Coronavirus- Rostering and Seating Issues
 

Coronavirus has created a new problem for airlines to manage:



It seems to me that there could now be at least 6 groups of passengers and crew sharing the air in the confined space of an aircraft.

It is important to distinguish these Groups when seating passengers and rostering crew.



Group A

Persons who have had Coronavirus and who are no longer infectious.

Group B

Persons who have had Coronavirus asymptomatically without realising they had it and who are no longer infectious.

Group C

Persons who currently have Coronavirus asymptomatically and genuinely do not know it but who could infect the people around them.

Group D

Persons who have not yet had Coronavirus and who could become infected with potentially fatal consequences.

Group E

Persons who think they have had Coronavirus because they suffered from Influenza or a similar condition during the Coronavirus pandemic but do not have Coronavirus. They too could become infected

Group F

Persons who are currently suffering from Coronavirus and suspect they are suffering from it but, for different reasons, do not care about infecting others.



This raises some interesting questions:



For example: Should you roster a Group E captain with a Group C first officer?

One problem is that Group E and F persons will probably declare themselves to be in Group A. Another problem is that Group B persons will think are Group C persons.

How do you seat these different groups of passengers?

Do you allow 2 meter spacing ?

Does it matter if you do not know for certain who is in which group?



No doubt the airlines will have robust and carefully designed plans to manage these issues before they resume their flying programmes.

Discuss.

[QUOTE
No doubt the airlines will have robust and carefully designed plans to manage these issues before they resume their flying programmes.][/QUOTE]

Always nice to see a bit of humour on this site.:ugh:

I'm curious to know how you think they could manage these issues? For me it's just quite simply a non starter.

I’d call in Sir Humphrey. He could sort this out for you....probably.

You are kidding surely? Most airlines cant even get people in the seats they have booked.

It’s simple, like swine flue etc the majority of the population will get it at some point. You can’t hide from it forever and for the vast majority it is mild. The measures put in place are to increase the time frame over which the population becomes infected. This allows healthcare systems to put measures in place to cope without being overwhelmed. The airflow through my aircraft type ensures the cabin air is completely replaced every three minutes. There is not much we can do other than be strict with hygiene and aircraft cleaning. Is there a case for restricting load factor? Possibly.

I speak as someone who has a family member who has in all probability had Covid 19. It is not a wild guess either as it was my father who until retirement was a doctor his whole working life. I won’t pretend it is nothing and his symptoms would probably be on the mild to moderate side. Swine flu put him in bed for two days. Covid put him in bed for five days and he continued to feel pretty rough for a good 10-12 days. He had muscle pain, fatigue, a dry cough, loss of smell, loss of taste and a temperature of 37.9 for close on a week. The temperature seemed worse later in the day.

Anyway I forget my point but essentially sensible precautions without throwing ourselves into a health disaster or a global depression.

Ah but you forgot about Group G:

The myriad of individuals that could unknowingly carry the virus that you encounter during a duty such as security staff, dispatchers, engineers and catering staff and frankly, anyone at all that will be within very close proximity to you or has touched something that you later touch yourself. How do we isolate ourselves from those unsuspecting biological villains? :confused:

Do you think those filthy trays at security that you put your iPad and liquids in have ever been cleaned, never mind disinfected?

Doesn’t matter, because there won’t t be any airlines left to have this problem at this rate

Everyone that doesn’t want to risk, what is for 96%, a mild/moderate dose of flu with a 2-3 week recovery time, stay at home and risk redundancy.

Exceptions for those living with vulnerable people, pilots with vulnerable conditions themselves and pilots of latter generations, aged, doddery, whichever politically incorrect label you choose.

The rest of us, like the rest of the healthy, young population need to crack on and prevent economic collapse of our countries. All this flattening the curve nonsense is doing is creating a situation whereby natural immunity is weakened by the length of time this is being drawn out thereby risking re-infection. I don’t see any vaccination this side of September at the earliest, which will be rightly reserved for Frontline key workers and the vulnerable.

this, despite media protestations, is not Ebola nor the Black Death. Neither are irresponsible medical predictions of 500,000 deaths which seem to have been forgotten coming true. I don’t see a single excel centre bed being used, I think in the wash up, a few doomsaying data modellers are going to have a lot of explaining to do. Some involved are wanting to be scalped by the farming community for having over three times the number of cattle slaughtered than later was determined required to contain foot and mouth.

2.4 Billion a day cost in the U.K.to economic production. That doesn’t include the money the government have increased expenditure by to cover social protection.

Also I think the exit from the lock down will be done in phases with some airports open while others remain closed. The government is talking about having corona virus passports for those who can prove they are immune and can return to work. It's going to be a big problem getting staff who are healthy and qualified/current to return to their work.

Thanks for the advice and the highly detailed scientific explanation. You must be a Nobel prized highly qualified immunologist to be able to make these kind of statements with what is happening in the world right now.

Nope, just personal experience of having it, my family having it, a load of colleagues having it, my neighbour having it and likely, at least 10% of the U.K. population having it.

of whom, 50% didn’t even know they had it.

check out the Iceland survey results.

I assume You, your relatives and your colleagues got tested for antibodies to ensure you actually got the covid and not the seasonal flu ?

yep, all paid for privately. Plus, I had the seasonal flu jab, with my wife and kids in December. No point in testing with the kids as we knew we had it and it was all over the house. They had very mild symptoms. It’s all over work and all the colleagues I spoke to have had this years flu jab (which we get free as part of our package).

if you get it, you know as the symptoms are distinct enough from flu. Would describe the severity though as mild/moderate flu. It’s not what it is being made out to be for the vast majority of healthy working people will have no issue with this. A damn sight less than the number transplant patients, cancer patients and other people with life threatening disorders will be killed if this nonsense lockdown continues, for healthy working age people.

Suggest you watch ITV (UK) report, “ Into the red zone”. Trip into Lombardy and in particular Bergamo hospital.
State of the art hospital, completely overwhelmed. Dedicated highly skilled care workers close to exhaustion, not to mention the time bomb of PTSD. But that’s ok, you’ve had it, so it’s not so bad. What is it fake news? Jesus it’s nutters like you that have contributed to the misery that thousands are experiencing because you know better. I’ve always known that the intelligence spread within the pilot community is spread, I just didn’t know it was so thin, or more correctly so dim.....

I really don't buy into the "it's just a bit of flu" argument but VR has a bit of a point....People very definitely are having treatments for some chronic conditions delayed/postponed because resources are committed to countering CV-19, possibly with life changing results.

BTW Interesting news coming out of France this lunchtime that about 30% of the crew of the Charles de Gaulle have tested positive for CV-19, as I understand it about 20 are in some form of intensive care....The effect of CV-19 on that young healthy population of just under 2000 will no doubt be of interest to the statisticians/epidemiologists..

Most people dying of it (over 98%) are over 70. Many would have bought the farm in winter if we hadn't had an exceptionally effective flu jab this winter season, meaning lots of vulnerable people were left in the population. The figures for the UK over winter were around 8K down on the normal weekly death stats. The CURRENT Uk weekly death stats currently match the worst flu outbreak in the last 10 years and are nowhere near where we were during the 1957 flu pandemic.

Yet instead of dealing with this rationally, we have decided to put the UK into the worst recession in over 300 years. So please, less reading of irrational media reporting, which seems to have gotten you a little bit excited and a little less lecturing about relative intelligence. You may want to have a look at the impact of a 1% GDP fall on poverty and subsequent life expectancy.

And I didn't mention fake news. My perspective is people need to come to terms that around 0.5% of the global population are going to succumb to this, many of whom would have been on the way out anyway in the next 2-3 years, with the chronic medical conditions that have left them vulnerable to NCov. We shouldnt be succumbing to media driven public hysteria and should be looking instead of the relative impact of our decisions. Sweden for example look as if they are past peak infection and instead of hiding behind the sofa at the 5 O'clock news for the next 6 months, will be through this much quicker than most western countries. With probably a similar total mortality count, compressed into a few months.

We also shouldn't be writing off thousands of Cancer patients and transplant list patients because the sexy disorder of the moment is NCov and Government are so scared of their shadow and criticism, they refuse to take difficult decisions. That in itself is a disgrace. Many of these people are of a working age with much life ahead of them, yet they are being written off to save people in the sunset years.

Where do you get your figures from? The weekly death rates published on the news are double of those we'd normally expect at this time of year and they lag the data by a number of days. Given these are the death rates with the lockdown measures in place, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect even higher death rates without any measures? Are you seriously trying to say everything the country has done is unnecessary just because your symptoms were mild?

Emirates Airlines Tests Passengers For COVID-19 Pre-Flight

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriew...19-pre-flight/

What you are describing is a state based on the ethics of barbarism, the ultimate end point of capitalism, market value above life, as doomed to failure as any other extreme system. Again look at Bergamo hospital, a more modern facility you won’t find anywhere in the world outside of purely privately funding establishments. Overwhelmed. Do you think they were able to carry out anything other than caring for dying patients. Triage was being practiced, much as you prescribe, didn’t much matter. Coffins being taken out by the military. But hey they’re in their “ sunshine” years. Herd immunity rules....

So, with your new found God authority, what age do you cut of, what criteria do you use, any thing that’s deemed by you as “sexy”? Or maybe now of no further use to society, even after contributing to building the society you now benefit from.

As an example of extremes, there’s you Vin Rouge, and there’s Cpt Tom Moore. 99 years old, raised 14million, but obviously condemned to DNR and useless in the Vin Rouge society of capitalistic judgement. God help us all.,,

I'm saying it was pointless to lock down the economy to the large numbers of people that this virus is a negligible risk. The lockdown should have been totalitarian for those demographics affected and at risk by NCov. Those groups are well known. By locking down the economy to everyone, we are literally burning the economy around us. Instead, the government crapped its pants to the exceptionally poorly managed communications and handling surrounding "Herd Immunity" (utterly the wrong phrase to use). How many over seventies are we still seeing using the supermarket? I counted at least thirty at the last visit. I cannot think of a higher risk area at present than the supermarket (other than a hospital) yet the highest risk groups are still avoiding the advice, refusing assistance and putting themselves at risk. This in turn risks the NHS from being completely inundated with patients requiring lengthy ICU care or death for them and other aged and vulnerable members of their homes. What I am saying is that what the country is doing is an utterly blunt instrument when a more intelligent application of lock down needs to be applied, but to only those at risk of clogging the pipes of the NHS. Exactly what Sweden are doing.

Yes, the figures are double those for this time of year. But this virus has not followed the timelines that the typical respiratory viral outbreak follows. And as a disease that is brand new to humanity, why would it? have a look at the weekly death figures for the past 10 years and have a look at what the typical peak in deaths are during the peak of seasonal flu.

There is significant evidence to suggest that a lot of the additional deaths are due to the fear that mass media and public hysteria has caused, meaning they are staying at home instead of ringing 999 for a suspected heart attack or stroke. A and E attendance is down to 1/3 its normal figure. You need to know what the statistics are saying rather than take them at face value.


Good to see this introduction by Emirates, ultimately sensible and where we will be going as an industry for the next 2 years. Even if a test is only 95% effective, better to have this data than not. 1 in 20 may continue to spread the disease, or there may be false positives, but it keeps things going.

Here is a question for you. How many heart transplants, cancer operations, nurses, schools, small business loans could the tax revenue on the 2.4 billion that we are losing in GDP take a day fund for my kids, your kids and their kids when they need it? Because what we are doing is stealing tomorrow’s money to save today’s problem and it’s a complete abrogation of responsibility of any government in managing a country’s finances.

Happens in other countries outside the UK as well...as long as they agree to "DNR/Do not ventilate" I guess they can carry on:ooh: .............

Ah....I think it's a bit early to claim Sweden has got this right and everybody else has been heavy handed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...l-reaches-1000

ONS data section 7/8 interesting....
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulat...rate-for-march

more and more people seem to think my earlier idea will be used as the means to unlock the country:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...GH-OSMOND.html


Cancer charities now struggling too:https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news...rpool-18105919

An acceptable trade off ?



Yes I know that the Lockdown is extremely damaging to the economy and it might seem to be an excessive response to protect the 99% of victims who are very old or who have multiple medical conditions.



But consider this :



Among the remaining 1%, there are thousands of people with very productive lives ahead of them. This includes many highly skilled and experienced healthcare professionals., people that we may all need to depend on one day. They are courageously putting the lives on the line now to treat Coronavirus patients at close quarters.



Most troubling of all is that, as of 15th April, TWENTY SIX public transport workers in London (mainly bus drivers) have also died. They did not have to get as close as clinicians to their customers but they still caught it. If we come off lockdown too early, I fear a second spike which may kill many of our friends, relations and colleagues. Many will be in customer facing roles. Can we really return to ‘normal’ before we have a vaccine? Who will want to work in a customer facing role ? Who would want to go on a plane? What sort of a normal will that be ?



A terrible dilemma.

.

Quote


more and more people seem to think my earlier idea will be used as the means to unlock the country:

...are you Donald Trump by any chance?

and “You’re idea” was the idea for a primary strategy before the elected political realised that pursuing it would render them unelectable for the foreseeable future. Most of the “ sunshine” expendables have sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandchildren etc...

Recently had a report from a healthy fellow crew member, totally outside of Vin Rouges demographic, that had a dose of Covid. Makes for sobering reading. Wondering if Vin R would be so eager to recommend the infection to everyone if his experience had been similar...

Vinrouge you make some interesting points. Does the fact that you have had (private testing??) the virus change your point of view?

If you had lost a close young family member and had another plugged into a ventilator would you still be wanting to get back to work so you could maintain what is I presume an expensive lifestyle?

Public sentiment certainly seems to be moving in the direction proposed by Mr. Rouge from what I can see.

In what way exactly? Just go back to work and let the NHS get completely overloaded? Maybe they could do the chemo therapy in the car parks.
it's an impossible situation and everyone has a point of view.
If it's just like a normal flu then why are the ICU struggling?

I realise old people die anyhow so maybe someone needs to start making some even more difficult decisions but as aircrew I dont feel we are in full possession of the relevant facts or particularly well qualified to comment.

How will ithe NHS be overloaded, when those that are causing 95% of ICU admissions are still on total lockdown? Nationally, we did not get anywhere near ICU overload. It was localised only and the military was ready to step in to use specialist intensive care transport support to move the burden around? If at risk groups stick to lockdown and regular test/contract trace of logistics personnel are established for people supplying them at home, there is no reason why at risk groups will be facing any enhanced risk. If people want to cut out all risk, they need to stay at home 24/7.

FACT - 93% of deaths have chronic healthcare issues.
FACT - 95% are over 75.
FACT - deaths amongst under 50s are less than 1 in a hundred of all deaths. Including those with known chronic conditions.

Id like to see from the limp waisted hang wringers where they suggest the money is coming from to make up the money that is being stolen from my children to pay for this economy destroying shutdown. We aren’t talking reduction in living standards. We are talking about long term damage to the economy with strife inflicted far worse than the impact of NCov.

[[color=#000000]If you had lost a close young family member and had another plugged into a ventilator would you still be wanting to get back to work so you could maintain what is I presume an expensive lifestyle?

have you seen the statistics for the number of under 18s, with no chronic condition who have ended up on ICU or have died? A hysterical Uninformed comment doesn’t stand up to the facts.

i don’t have an expensive lifestyle. I just don’t want this generation stealing even more of my children’s future for no long term goal. If a more stringent lockdown is established for vulnerable and aged, there will be no icu overload, reduced economic catastrophic impact with will mean more of us will maintain recognised living standards than what will happen with the mismanagement currently established.

Ive spent extensive time in Central America and central Africa. I’ve seen what happens when NICE cut the cost of a life from the current 50k to under 50 quid. You can have that, I won’t be taking it. Like others will be happy to take your job as a result of the carnage you are proposing.Watch a 4 year old kid bin pick for their next meal and it will change your perspective. I saw that in Argentina, not a third world country by any stretch. Economically illiterate.

if they paid for it, where has the cash from North Sea oil gone and why do we have a public debt of over 1.8 trillion? Why are we now spending far less on education, policing and infrastructure and more on pensions and health as a proportion of gdp than any time in modern history? Get gramps and granny locked up. They will then be safe. Also, Give over on childish insults about paternity. It demonstrates your lack of intelligence.

You are going to have to accept that we cannot wrap everyone in cotton wool at a time like this. Our elected grown ups will make those decisions on our behalf in the next 2 weeks. It will be you and not I that has to deal with dislocation of expectation.

I dont know where the cash from the North Sea oil went, we have already established Im not that clever.

So what do you suggest?

It seems you are in Germany vinrouge, things are different there to the UK I would suggest.

no longer. Came back off from military exchange years ago,

The suggested return to normalisation I’m afraid isn’t an option. What are you trying to preserve for your children? That’s an open question for us all.

A continuation of our current life style choices and way of life will eventually just guarantee a repeat of the current situation. Capitalism only survives with continuous growth, expansion, consumption, market value rules over life. Continual encroachment of pristine rain Forrest, loss of habitat pushing species ever closer together making cross contamination of pathogens ever more likely. It’s nothing new, Jesus even Hollywood managed to predict it 5 years ago.Can you imagine a pathogen with the same incubation period as Covid19, with the mortality rate of MERS? Most of the time a virus will mutate to a less potent state, Ebola has several strains.....if you want to sleep well don’t search for what the worst does...

We need less consumption, less drive for efficiency, less drive for expansion. There are amazingly a myriad of jobs that are literally unneeded, created and sustained to support the system, a bit lit Ryanair putting an airframe on a route that never previously existed, but make it cheap enough and they will come.
I don’t have the answers, I’m not clever enough, but I do know what we’ve got isn’t...

So maybe we don’t need to throw our elderly parents under the bus in the name of a short term return to normality...maybe we need to accept that we’ve got it wrong, and if we don’t our children won’t have any future at all, let alone one that is less than we’d all hoped for....

Its not just the elderly. What about my friends 16 year old diabetic son, young parents with MS.

It is an incredibly difficult situation for everyone. Personally I would rather do without (I have done before) and keep the people around me safe and trust in those who specialise in dealing with this just like they trust me to do my job properly when I take them on holiday.

If there is a single vulnerable member of the household, as per what I have said before, the whole family Will have to remain on lockdown. But that is no different than the status quo. The difficult decision government will have is if it turns out ethnicity is a significant risk factor. A whole load of moral hazard may be about to rear it’s head.

A point though. No vaccine is 100% effective. Most, around 80%+ fortunately. . So, what do you suggest people do? Stay locked at home indefinitely just in case they are part of the 20% that have no immunity. There will still be residual risk for those with chronic identified conditions, even once the jab has been deployed.

My answer to that would be, did we start wearing sandals, long socks and revert to socialism en masse after 100 million died of Spanish flu In 1918 and then nearly a million globally from the 1957 outbreak (from a much lower global population). Or did we just get on with it? I’ve never suggested throwing the elderly or vulnerable under a bus. But there are more intelligent and effective ways of handling this crisis.

This situation is not unique. The global community has been here before and had it much worse. What has changed is some bizarre notion that we all have a right to live to past 100, despite ignoring scientific advice about smoking, obesity, drinking and type 2 diabetes.

If you want to look for a reason things are going off the rails, it’s not globalisation. It’s too many people on a planet that is past capacity. We don’t have a too much co2 problem for example. We have a too many people emitting Co2 problem. Nature has a pretty good track history of correcting global imbalance.

I was at the front line of the U.K. response to the last major outbreak on and off for a number of weeks, with flights to West Africa. I saw it first hand In some of the U.K. repatriations and evacuations we were involved in. All UK were caught by testing at a very early symptomatic stage, runny nose that sort of thing. The briefings we had (including some disturbing photosfrom the last stages) made it quite clear you didn’t want to get it. Fortunately, Ebola has a pretty low Transmissivity, certainly much lower than NCov. when foreign assistance first turned up, survival rates were pretty much zero. By the end, it was more like 60-80% in the patients favour. Most of international help cut the outbreak in 2014/15 by education in how to handle dead bodies. There were a lot of cultural norms which were massively increasing transmission and took a lot of work/education to break those norms.


What I would say a lot was learned from that outbreak, more than you will ever know at a deep research level. I hope that some of what has been learned is being deployed in fighting NCov from a potential treatment perspective.

Vinrouge you obviously have all the right answers, why not ring Boris when hes back in the office and tell him.

Theres loads of people still working not least the NHS. Maybe the tourist industry is screwed. Being skint isn't the end of the world, I've been there, its character building.

Spanish flu caused a million deaths, would it have been much less if they had all stayed home? Just saying. Who knows?

we aren’t talking about being skint though. Just as you think I am downplaying the impact or severity of NCov, you are doing the same with the economic impact. Shutting 90% of
your economy down is going to have a wider impact than tourism. And not temporarily either.

ive done my time being a public servant. 20 years of it and absolutely no interest in going back to inefficiency, waste and poor leadership. I grew up skint as a kid and it was turd, not sure about character building. No thanks.

No use telling these loons. They are the ones that promised the nation sunlit Brexit uplands, whilst not having enough British interest to pick veg and having to beg the international community for ventilators. Mainly in Europe. Let’s also not forget Michael “we are done listening to experts” Gove. It appears that no one is in charge at the moment anyhow.

Coronavirus: Lack of political leader leaves scientists in charge, say Tories

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-lack-of-political-leader-leaves-scientists-in-charge-say-tories-z72sdfcdn

Globalisation and over population probably go hand in hand. You seem to welcome the opportunity of a mass extermination of people you deem to be of either the wrong demographic or of a lesser intelligence. It’s not a new view point, the last really big reduction in world population was brought about by similar elitist agendas not by Gaia.

As for reverting to socialism, there are still remote South Pacific islands that exist in perfect harmony with their environment. Not by any other means than coexisting with themselves and nature. Perfect socialism, not that they’d know it.

pulling our socks up isn’t going to cut it anymore. Less consumption, less expansion, more conservation might give us a chance. We have no idea what pathogens are waiting to cross over in pristine Rain Forrests. And that is very Gaia, and very scary....