A study published Tuesday seems to attest that the risk of coronavirus transmission on airplanes is significantly less than what has been believed until now, an AFP report said.

The study researched a plane flight from Israel to Germany in March, before wearing face masks to protect against virus transmission became prevalent and well before airlines began mandating the use of face masks on flights.

A flight with 102 passengers from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt took off on March 9 for a flight of four hours and 40 minutes. Aboard the flight was a group of 24 German tourists, who had been in contact with a hotel manager in Israel who later tested positive for the coronavirus.

German authorities were alerted about the incident and they tested the tourists upon arrival to Frankfurt. Seven of the tourists tested positive and another seven who initially tested negative tested positive on subsequent tests.

A month or so later, virologists at a university hospital in Frankfurt decided to contact all the passengers on the flight to evaluate the risk of traveling on a plane fight with coronavirus carriers. They contacted the 78 other passengers on the flight and 90% responded to the researchers’ questions about coronavirus symptoms and their activities and contacts since the flight. The researchers also tested several of the passengers.

The results were surprising. The researchers found that only two passengers likely contracted the coronavirus during the course of the flight – the two passengers who were sitting across the aisle from the original seven coronavirus carriers.

Although virologists consider the two rows in front of and behind a virus carrier on an airplane to be the contagion zone, a passenger who was seated in the row (seat 44K) directly ahead of two of the coronavirus carriers (seats 45J and 45H) did not contract the virus.

“This person from row 44 told us that he had a long conversation, and was speaking a long time with both of row 45,” Sandra Ciesek, the head of the Institute of Medical Virology in Frankfurt, told AFP.

Two passengers who sat behind another coronavirus carrier also did not contract the virus.

“We were surprised to only find two likely transmissions,” said Sebastian Hoehl, a researcher at the Institute.

The researchers did not test all the passengers so they couldn’t decidedly conclude that none of them were infected but as Hoehl said: “The rate was lower than what we expected, and as none of the passengers wore masks, I think it is reassuring that we could not detect more cases.”

The study, which was published Tuesday in the US medical journal JAMA Network Open, noted that despite their findings, coronavirus transmission on an airplane is definitely possible if face masks aren’t worn.

However, the researchers added that multiple studies carried out on repatriation flights from Wuhan, China at the start of the coronavirus outbreak found that wearing masks had a 100% success rate at preventing virus transmission.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)