Tea at Trianon: Airplane Covid Theater May Never End

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 21, 2022

Airplane Covid Theater May Never End

From The American Conservative:

Both Sarkisian and Kunisch cited a report by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and funded by Airlines for America, a trade association to which most of the major airlines in the United States belong to support their position. According to the report, “[A] layered NPI [non-pharmaceutical intervention] approach, of wearing face masks, disinfection of surfaces and maintenance of appropriate ventilation gate-to-gate, will ensure the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission onboard aircraft will be below that found in other routine activities during the pandemic, such as grocery shopping or eating out.”
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) reiterated these points in a statement, claiming that “the aircraft cabin remains a very low risk environment for contracting COVID-19 even though Omicron appears to be more transmissible than other variants in all environments.” The IATA similarly cited air filtration, masking, and enhanced cleaning measures as contributing factors to the low risk of Covid transmission on aircraft.
Steven Templeton, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine-Terre Haute, who has experience studying coronaviruses and working at the Health Effects Laboratory Division at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, largely agrees with these assessments.
Speaking in a phone interview, Templeton said, “[When] you’re having the entire load of air within an aircraft cabin changed every two to three minutes, that’s phenomenal ventilation. You really don’t get that in most buildings…[So] unless you’re in really, really close proximity [to an infectious person] it almost exponentially lowers the ability of particles to be exchanged between people.”
Practically, he said, this is evidenced by the fact that “before there was a pandemic, you never really saw outbreaks of respiratory viruses on airplanes unless there was an issue with the ventilation system,” as was the case in one classic example he related:
In 1977 a passenger had influenza on an airplane that was basically locked on, stuck on the tarmac for three hours without functioning ventilation…The air handling system was shut down completely. About a week later…some large percent of other passengers actually came down with the flu but that was a really extraordinary circumstance. I mean, you’d have to have something like that happen in order to have a major COVID outbreak on an airplane.
When asked about the likelihood that other Covid-mitigation measures beyond good ventilation could further reduce the risk of transmission on a plane, Templeton said he remains unconvinced.
On his popular science Substack, Templeton wrote in detail about what he sees as the lack of scientific support for the use of most masks. When interviewed, he said, “It appears cloth masks in their best-case scenario would buy you minutes. The best-case scenario for changes in air quality or improvement in ventilation would buy you hours.”
With regard to vaccine requirements, he added, “I think it’s clear that the [Covid] vaccines don’t protect against infection and transmission like we thought they initially would.” Numerous recent studies seem to support this assertion.
Researchers in Qatar demonstrated that the protection offered by the vaccine against infection “peaks in the first month after the second dose, and then gradually wanes in subsequent months.” However, they continue to provide protection against hospitalization and death.
Using viral load as a proxy for infectiousness, Israeli researchers showed the Covid-19 vaccines to be “initially effective in reducing viral loads…[but their] effectiveness declines with time after vaccination, significantly decreasing at 3 months after vaccination and effectively vanishing after about 6 months.” (Read more.)