Researcher: The Odds of Catching COVID-19 on a Flight Are Extremely Low

The odds of catching COVID-19 on a short commercial flight, even if it’s full, are extremely low, according to an analysis by a statistician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CNN reported on the findings of Arnold Barnett, professor of statistics at MIT, who calculated the odds and determined that although flyers will want to take precautions such as wearing a mask, transmission of the virus on airplanes is very rare. From CNN:

According to his findings, based on short haul flights in the US on aircraft configured with three seats on either side of the aisle, such as the Airbus 320 and the Boeing 737—and assuming everyone is wearing a mask—the risk of catching the virus on a full flight is just 1 in 4,300. Those odds fall to 1 in 7,700 if the middle seat is vacant.

“Most things are more dangerous now than they were before Covid, and aviation is no exception to that,” he tells CNN Travel.

“But three things have to go wrong for you to get infected (on a flight). There has to be a Covid-19 patient on board and they have to be contagious,” he says. “If there is such a person on your flight, assuming they are wearing a mask, it has to fail to prevent the transmission.

(Read more from “Researcher: The Odds of Catching COVID-19 on a Flight Are Extremely Low” HERE)

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