Dan
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I slept as much as I could during the 20-hour flights with the help of Benadryl! 
Is it possible to travel responsibly (during a pandemic)?
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Everybody is approaching it differently, but what I am doing is scheduling all the "far" trips for late 2022-2023 and doing what I consider to be "close" trips now and through this time next year. That has less to do with my own tolerance for travel/masks, etc. and more to do with my fear that I might not be able to get where I am going reliably and end up missing a trip or something due to airline clusterfudgery. I did Turks last month and that was fine and am doing Socorro in Dec. Chuuk I scheduled for fall of 2023. I don't even want to think about trying to get there right now.
Of course, this may backfire and it might actually get worse rather than better with the variant stuff but I am banking on things getting easier and more normal within the next year or two so I can throw Raja back on my list.
My family and I will travel anywhere we are allowed and even some places we aren't. But then we are weird.
I'm impressed you kept your mask on for that whole trip minus eating and drinking, but I wonder how effective it was given you must've had to eat and drink several times during those 18 hours. I just took my first flight since COVID. It was only 2.5 hours each way, yet they felt it was necessary to have drink and snack service. Some passengers even brought their own meals, so there was pretty much at least one unmasked person around at all times during that flight. I'm not super confident the masks provided any meaningful protection, given the degree to which the exception swallowed the rule.
I planned that trip, and my next one for next month, back when the experts were saying basically "if you're vaccinated, you're good!" Now of course things are looking rather grim with breakthrough cases from the Delta variant. I'm honestly struggling to decide how much I should care. I have always felt pretty good about my own odds in this pandemic (given my youth and health), but have felt a great sense of collectivist responsibility toward those who have risk factors.
Now we have entered an era, at least in the United States, where everyone who wants a vaccine can get one, and yet lots of people are declining for BS reasons. I'm not willing to continue sacrificing travel, parties, and other things I enjoy just to protect those people. But because there are so many of them incubating variants that could potentially infect even those who are vaccinated and careful, I'm left struggling to decide what is still owed to them. It's of course a different calculus when planning a trip to a poorer country where the vaccine isn't as widely available. I think I will continue to hold off on those trips for now.
That occurred to me. It also occurred to me that where I was traveling, I believe everyone had to show evidence of a negative covid test (required for re-entry to the US) and, for Americans entering some European countries, proof of vaccination. So as I sat on planes and walked through airports it occurred to me that essentially everyone around me was about as safe as they could be--almost certainly safer than the average crowd I might walk through in a store here in Atlanta. It's possible that since transmission is a statistical thing, apparently involving factors of exposure time, viral load, air circulation, and maybe more, the more people who keep masks on for more time, the less transmission there will be. In other words, maybe the science figures that a small number of unmasked people at any given time might not cause a problem. It's been discussed, maybe in this thread, that air circulation/filtration on a plane is very good. Looking around, I didn't notice anyone who seemed to be trying to game the system by continually eating or drinking. In fact, the announcement over the intercom about masks specifically said to replace your mask between bites/sips. Even I had difficulty strictly complying with that, but most people seemed to be trying their best.
@Dan , you're the kind of inveterate traveler I was referring to. I don't know how you do it. Even with a sleeping pill I couldn't fall asleep for long wearing a mask. Business class might have helped, but that's out of my reach.
No more long trips for me for a while.
I had similar thoughts. I flew to Seattle, and my next flight is to Hawaii. Those seem like relatively safe places compared to, say, Florida. And I am comforted by the evidence that the filtration systems on airplanes seem to be at least somewhat effective.
I skipped a family reunion on the east coast this summer. It turned into a complete mess due to a standoff between the anti-vaxxers and the rest of the family, some of whom have children too young to be vaccinated. I did see another anti-vaxxer from the other side of the family who drove down from Oregon to southern California, and while I did say my piece to her, I didn't feel the need to refuse contact given my personal risk assessment. We tend to think of the risks of travel as coming from those strangers seated next to us on the plane. But there's also the people we travel to see, some of whom, much as we love them, are idiots putting us all in danger.
I skipped a family reunion on the east coast this summer. It turned into a complete mess due to a standoff between the anti-vaxxers and the rest of the family, some of whom have children too young to be vaccinated. I did see another anti-vaxxer from the other side of the family who drove down from Oregon to southern California, and while I did say my piece to her, I didn't feel the need to refuse contact given my personal risk assessment. We tend to think of the risks of travel as coming from those strangers seated next to us on the plane. But there's also the people we travel to see, some of whom, much as we love them, are idiots putting us all in danger.
Florida which is below the national average, despite having the second oldest population of any state, and COVID loves killing old people. Your home state is only a couple of slots below Florida, despite have the 8th youngest population.
The media loves to attack Florida because they bucked the trend and didn't going to state wide lock downs and restrictions. But our numbers are pretty damn good for God's waiting room.
The airplane is probably the safest airspace to be protected from an aerosol pathogen, even better with mask, even better better with mask and vaccine. But I agree. I’m just going to wear my mask and go about my business. I’m helping myself a lot and other people a little.
Dan
Contributor
That’s a lot of truth about the advantage being in COVID-19 free bubble while in the airplane. I’ve been flying out just about every month since last December. I have been COVID-19 tested negative for about a dozen times and got vaccinated (Moderna) back in February & April.
I’ll have 4 more flights to do for 2021. Fingers crossed!
I’ll have 4 more flights to do for 2021. Fingers crossed!
What's your source on this?
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