Ask the Editors: The Aviation Week Network invites our readers to submit questions to our editors and analysts. We’ll answer them, and if we can’t we’ll reach out to our wide network of experts for advice.

Are there a lot of known cases of passengers getting COVID-19 on flights or in airports? If not, where is all the angst about getting infected on flights coming from?

Air Transport World Editor-in-Chief Karen Walker responds:

There are very few cases of transmission, either to passengers or crews, to the point that such transmission could be considered rare. This has even been the case on some long-haul, international repatriation flights where passengers either developed symptoms while onboard or were found to be positive for COVID-19 after they left the aircraft. In all cases, through contact tracing, it is known that no one else on those flights contracted the virus.

While not entirely understood, the reason for this generally accepted by medical experts monitoring flights—including IATA’s own medical advisor—is the multiple layers of systems and processes that occur onboard aircraft. This begins with modern airliners’ hospital-grade HEPA filters that clean and refresh cabin air every 3 min. and filter out some 95% or more of viruses, including the novel coronavirus.

Also, people are typically all facing forward, so seatbacks act as a natural barrier. Add mandatory mask wearing, regular and extreme disinfecting, limited and sealed food and beverage services, as well as other precautions, and an airliner is far safer than a restaurant, grocery store, hair salon and maybe most homes.

Why doesn’t the public understand this? That’s a question for the airlines and those organizations that represent them, including Airlines for America, IATA and ICAO. The industry has done a superb job—at significant cost and time—in putting safety first and quickly getting all these extra health measures in place. But, they have done a lousy job at communicating those efforts and the low transmission data to the very people who need to hear it: lawmakers, heads of medical organizations (like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), the media and the general public.