Qatar Airways has announced that economy passengers and cabin crew will be required to wear a faceshield in addition to facemasks that were already required. Qatar will provide passengers with these masks (at Hamad International Airport (HIA) they will be provided at check in and at other airports they will be provided at the boarding gates). Premium cabin passengers will also be provided with these protective kits but are asked to wear them at their ‘discretion’.
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i wore the mask for most of the time for my syd-sfo flight, the earloop rub the back of my ears raw. need those clip or something to clip the rubberband instead of using the ears. Or use the type that tie behind the head.
i don’t know if it is entirely possible for people actually wear that for a 15 hrs flight entirely.
With all of these complaints by Americans about wearing a mask or being in denial about the severity of the coronavirus, it just shows our true character: the most selfish and arrogant citizens on the planet. So much for being the leaders of the world.
Who exactly thinks that Americans are the “leaders of the world”?
Americans
Qatar – lockdown – masks…is it working? Never flying Qatar Air with a face shield.
I look at it like this, wearing protection doesn’t hurt anyone, but not wearing any at all absolutely does.
The question people are sarcastically asking is….So the masks aren’t enough? Either they work or they don’t. Its pretty clear they only potential help stop the spread from infected people. The face shield is in that same category. So their requirement is either overreach or the masks don’t work. The same thing goes for the stopgap measure of taking temperatures and showing signs of infection. Are asymptomatic people contagious or not? If they are, we are in a world of hurt with no vaccine. If not, then is this all political theater?
Why have airbags if seatbelts work?
Not everything is binary. Spectrums exist. Risk management is a spectrum.
They should require condoms for the mile high club too
cough’s travel up to 50 mph and carry around 3,000 droplets a pop. Sneezes can travel up to 100 mph and make nearly 100k droplets. Any extra layer of protection is potentially useful. I wonder how long till person/organization says we gotta wear full HAZMAT suit like in the movies.
sloths travel upto 0.003 miles per hour; unless they travel by other means.
Does my emotional support sloth need PPE? They only need to do their business once a week so they are ideal pets, but they are poor for playing fetch.
I’ll pass on air travel if it means wearing a PPS/Hazmat suit and a diaper – repatriation flight; might be the exception.
“Any extra layer of protection is potentially useful.”
Well sure and I’d bet a Ziploc baggy reduces the risk of HIV transmission. Question is will any level of reduced risk really justify being in a very risky situation? Or are we just implementing things that only marginally reduce risk in order to discount what is still inherently very risky?
Qatar’s intentions are misplaced. The primary purpose of face shields is to prevent the WEARER from being infected by airborne respiratory droplets, while a face mask is to contain respiratory droplets from infecting OTHERS. If everyone is wearing a mask, the need for face shields becomes less of a concern.
Rather than face shields, I think goggles would be a more practical, and potentially more effective, alternative.
Fair point
Give me a face shield over goggles. Goggles fog to easily and if occular infections are a vector for infection; goggles would likely be problematic because of fogging.
Face shield also mitigate expelled droplets from coughs and sneezes by the wearer.
Oregon mandatory face coverings inside public spaces – a face shield is considered an acceptable face covering by OHA and is listed on OHA signs.
@YoniPDX
Your point about goggles fogging up is not much of a concern in an airplane because the air in the cabin is normally very dry. Plus, the goggles worn by healthcare professionals don’t really fog up because they are ventilated (but enclosed with fabric). Don’t think of them as swimming goggles.
Also, my point of wearing goggles is that the wearer must also be wearing a face mask.
Wow , Qatar step it up . Ask economy passengers to wear PPE mandatorily .. stupid guys .
Wow, Qatar’s move is almost unbelievable. BTW, is there a single documented case of anyone catching COVID on an airplane? We now have 600,000 Americans flying every day. I presume we’d be hearing of sob stories if they existed. Just mathematically, SOMEBODY must catch COVID on an airplane, right?
Why are you complaining? You want to come see the dying patients I see? Why don’t you spend your energy on something productive?
As an ED doc (per your moniker) pre-COVID people weren’t dying?
US mortalities (nationwide) based on cremation and burials the annualized numbers are lower than the 2017 CDC’s numbers.
If your need help processing the mortalities, seek support. If your unable to sublimate or process it, perhaps the ED isn’t the ideal field of medicine. I know that some in pediatric oncology really struggle, more so with the RNs that have greater interaction on a more regular basis.
That “data” you’re citing has been repeatedly misused on social media. The main issue is that particular surveillance program lags by at least 8 weeks, and often lags by several months — the 2017 data wasn’t finalized until 2019. You can find much more real time all cause surveillance data at the state levels; especially in states like New York, all cause deaths were way up this year over the same period last year. See for example the JAMA paper “Estimation of Excess Deaths Associated With the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States, March to May 2020”
@YoniPDX
Mortality rate for March-May is up from same period from 2019. What are you talking about? Yale University already published their findings. In fact, they are saying the COVID deaths are being underreported by as much as 30%.
Thank you
why don’t you study other countries who locked down early and made masks mandatory….see how it COUGH COUGH hasn’t worked…or you can just regurgitate the media…worldometers for a quick way to see…but have to drill down..
@quasimodo
South Korea <300 deaths. Taiwan <10. Singapore <10. These countries wear masks and had no lockdowns. What are you talking about?
With your bad attitude, I sure wouldn’t want you treating me (or, really, anyone else).
There are a handful of people who have had COVID several days after flights, but hard to prove that’s where they caught it (and probably many others unreported). You can look up the case of Dr. Joseph Fair as a possible example.
It can be extremely had to tell where EXACTLY one caught Covid, unless they were self-isolating except when on the plane itself, which for most people is impossible. Even if they caught it on a plane trip, it would be near impossible to tell if they caught on the plane itself, or in the airport, or on the way to or from the airport. Lots of Covid transmission is from people who are showing no symptoms at that moment, so how you can tell you who got Covid from???
And that makes it’s impossible to prove that you can’t get Covid in one particular place or another, JUST DUE to lack of “documented” cases traced down to that exact place.
Has anyone studied this at all at this point? Like with flight crew? Obviously, crew could get it anywhere, but if flight crew were getting more COVID cases than normal (and compared to say, hotel workers or ground staff) we might know something useful.
Even with flight crew, it probably wouldn’t necessarily be valid, because on shorter domestic flights they do stuff at the airport between planes (including perhaps congregating in crew lounges), and on longer flights are put up in hotels for overnight stays between assignments (if not coming back to their home base for overnight, and if not working a redeye flight).
And solo infections are typically not reported by job, only if a group of people are infected (on the local TV news here in LA that’s been a constant issue, with one TV station griping that they can’t find out if one person at a local grocery has been infected, they are only notified if multiple people at the same grocery store are infected). But if a group of people are infected, you may not be able to figure out where it started, because if a group of flight attendants got it, it might have been on a plane or it might have been somewhere they were together off of the plane.
That’s in fact the big problem with “tracing”. Tracing is simple if someone stays mostly at home and only goes out once every few days. Tracing is very complicated if someone who travels a lot is diagnosed many days later, and has to try to identify every random person they may have been in contact with throughout various aspects of their travel many days before.
Since hardly anyone flies without going through an airport (and many people have to take shared transport of some sort, whether a rideshare or public transport from home or just a shuttle from an airport parking lot), it’s hard to tell which part of that has the greatest chance of transmission. For example, planes are touted as having fast air exchange, but that might not always be the case during every moment of boarding and deplaning, but it might the case for those people who board last and/or deplane first. So things like that make it ever more complicated to analyze.
So no matter much you might be interested in the question, I doubt that it’s anywhere near the top questions that people who are doing studies about Covid-19 want to figure out.
And that’s exactly why different airlines may be trying different things, because no one knows for sure.
“Business Class customers are asked to wear their face shield and mask onboard at their own discretion, as they enjoy more space and privacy.”
TL;DR: if you’re rich, the pandemic doesn’t apply to you.
Business class customers are more spaced out. Use your brain
Not 6 feet apart. In a closed space. Doesn’t matter if they have an extra arm rest space.
depends on the seating arrangement in business. Some are certainly more than 6 feet apart, and some have partitions between seats.
Have you ever flown Qatar? Because of where it’s based and what it focuses on, relatively few of Qatar’s flights are shorthaul, so they mostly use longhaul planes with widely spaced and divided seats in business class. Ie, it’s the kind of business seats you often find on other airlines only on truly longhaul flights, but in Qatar’s case you find it on most of their flights.
So even when the seats may be closer, there’s dividers between them. Qatar may have a separate Covid-19 policy of mandating that those dividers be raised except when travelers traveling together are on both sides of such a divider, I don’t know, that would documented elsewhere if it’s the case.
But in any case, even if not mandated by the airline, in the Covid-19 era, I bet most passengers would want such dividers raised between them an another stranger.
Dividers are accepted substitutes for being 6 feet apart. That’s why they’re being put up it grocery stores, hotel front desks, etc, etc.
They’re better than nothing, but that’s not saying much.
I hope you’re trolling.