Originally Posted by
Frequent_Flyer
......
Noone quaranteened them or us, we just hoped the elderly would survive the 10+ hours of loosing liquids violently!
So for this Emirates flight, perhaps the avaition authorities in the US are being somewhat overly cautious, to put it in a PC kind of way?
Well, almost certainly the authorities are being over-cautious
on this occasion.
However, they are in a dilemma; it is fantastically unlikely that any one incident represents a serious risk to the wider population. But fantastically unlikely things always eventually happen - I don't have to tell that to pilots.
My colleagues who work on emerging infectious disease tell me that
1. A pandemic that kills 100s of millions is inevitable, whether that will be next week or next decade no-one knows, but it is close to certain.
2. The massive increase in air-travel will be one of the primary drivers that will convert this pandemic from a nasty local flare-up that self limits, to a global catastrophe.