Serving Meals During Flights is a High-Risk Activity

COVID has changed the world in many ways. Our society had to adapt quite rapidly to manage the risks of the disease while allowing us to go back to our daily routines. One of the facets of life impacted severely has been air travel - and one where Indian airlines still haven't completely adapted to be able to reduce transmission during travel.

India has done extremely well in containing COVID-19 so far by taking timely steps of such as lockdown and extensive communication. Early decision of implementing a lockdown across the country helped in delaying increase in the number of cases, providing much needed opportunity to build the infrastructure to handle large volume of cases at later stage. The success of these initiatives is visible in total number of COVID positive cases as well as the number of fatalities, which are lesser than anywhere in the world, when seen in light of the 1.3 billion population of our country.

With continuing delay in getting medicine as well as a vaccine, it is necessary to restart daily activities in phases to ensure that the economy does not suffer endlessly, thereby adversely affecting the country at large. The GOI has been taking very thoughtful steps to restart economic activities in a phased manner, which is highly commendable.

In this context, airlines have been allowed to operate within specified guidelines. Initially it was decided to keep the middle seat vacant to exercise reasonable social distancing. However, this was possibly found economically unviable and this restriction was removed. Now aircrafts are flying with all three seats in a row filled but with mask, face shield, and PPE kit. This seems to be working out well, ensuring reasonable protection for all passengers, as they are inhaling filtered air at all times.

But all these efforts go in vain, when meals are served during the flight and all passengers remove their face shield as well as mask for a good 15-20 minutes, still sitting close to each other in a closed aircraft. This poses huge risk to all passengers of infecting or getting infected from each other during this time.

Normal flying time for domestic flights in India is not more than 2-3 hours and most people may do fine without having meals in aircraft during this period. It is strongly felt that meals should not be served in any domestic flight until the COVID-19 situation improves significantly. This restriction will go a long way in ensuring that the airline passengers remain safe from any infection and all precautions being taken do not go in vain.

The suggestion is to STOP ALL MEALS IN DOMESTIC FLIGHTS WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT till COVID situation improves!!

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This article was originally published on LinkedIn in 2020. Click on the link to find the post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/evivek_activity-6743523885582561280-MkUm