Poll: How Much Extra Time Are Passengers Prepared To Spend At Airports To Facilitate Potential Health Screenings And Social Distancing?

While there appears to be broad agreement that new measures have to be introduced to protect the health of passengers and crew, whether or not seats have to be left empty on aircraft is emerging as a key issue. 

Lufthansa and Eurowings have already taken numerous measures to increase the distance between passengers along the entire travel chain, such as at check-in counters or when boarding and disembarking the aircraft.

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Comments

2 Comments
Any such extra measures must be data driven. Good data takes time AND proper collection. There are many potential problems with pushing SARS CoV-2 tests into the wild before they have been tested themselves repeatedly for true rates of false negatives and false positives. True, no test like this will ever be 100% accurate and time pressure is a concern, but if your data is based upon something like the original WHO test with its ~30% false positive/negative rate, what good IS your data in making these screening and or seating distance choices? Then there is the issue of contagiousness of the virus. This virus “wants” to make a living too. Could we inadvertently select for a more contagious variant of this virus by our distancing and masking?? Perhaps if this is the case, then we could be in for a rough winter if this virus returns, but of our own making. I agree short term erring on the side of caution might be best, but let’s not get into a situation where these draconian economic and freedom of movement chilling regulations are left in place forever because of bad data and the politics of fear. Remember according to the UK study that kicked off this whole shelter in place situation, in the US the forecast was for 2.2 million deaths. You might say it could have been so without social distancing, but how do you prove it to be true? You cannot. Interestingly, the fellow Neil Ferguson who helped write that paper resigned from his position as he had tested positive for this virus presumably caught while attending a conference and was having an affair thus violating the very same restrictions his paper helped shape.
Beyond that, his forecast was based upon....
Almost forgot. To take a temperature and ask a few questions shouldn’t be more than 5 minutes extra. Your poll needs more range.