this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Airports and planes see a lot of traffic from all over the world constantly rotating through. With some variation depending on the size of the city and your personal schedule, you're running into more of the same people on normal public transport.
And you're in very close proximity for a very long time. I don't know how HVAC works on an aircraft but I assume there's a large amount of recirculation.
I was on buses and trains this morning. They weren't nearly as crowded, the trips were a lot shorter, the air moved around at every stop, and like you said, they're all pretty local, so low risk of someone importing weird diseases. At least on the subways, you should still wear a mask if only because of the air quality. There's a lot of brake dust floating around.
The filtration system on an airplane makes it one of the safer places to be for almost any airborne infection. The airport itself is much more dangerous, longer flights notwithstanding.