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Air travel in a COVID-19 world: Commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures
BACKGROUND: COVID-19 and its associated travel bans have reduced international passenger traffic by over 80% below 2019 levels. If airlines are to resume flying at commercially sustainable levels, they must work to restore passengers confidence and sense of security. This study examined commercial a...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control. Published by Elsevier B.V.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7674115/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33303405 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.idh.2020.11.002 |
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author | Sotomayor-Castillo, Cristina Radford, Kaitlyn Li, Cecilia Nahidi, Shizar Shaban, Ramon Z. |
author_facet | Sotomayor-Castillo, Cristina Radford, Kaitlyn Li, Cecilia Nahidi, Shizar Shaban, Ramon Z. |
author_sort | Sotomayor-Castillo, Cristina |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: COVID-19 and its associated travel bans have reduced international passenger traffic by over 80% below 2019 levels. If airlines are to resume flying at commercially sustainable levels, they must work to restore passengers confidence and sense of security. This study examined commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and control measures for travel health and safety in the current COVID-19 global pandemic. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted inviting adult members of 39 frequent flyer groups across three social media platforms to participate in an online survey. RESULTS: A total of 205 respondents completed the survey. The majority (75.6%) reported feeling ‘somewhat’ to ‘extremely concerned’ about contracting an infectious disease while flying, particularly respiratory-related. Few (9.8%) reported perceiving their health as an ‘essential priority’ for their preferred airline. Most respondents agreed airlines should provide complimentary hand sanitisers (86.8%), sanitary wipes (82.9%) and masks (64.4%) for passengers to use while flying as well as more information about preventing the spread of infections (90.7%), which would make the majority feel safer to fly. CONCLUSION: COVID-19 has extensively challenged the air travel industry. Passengers have signalled that they expect more from airlines, and that they would actively engage in additional infection prevention and disease control measures while flying. Airlines must ensure passengers about the steps taken to minimize travel-associated risks, and their commitment towards passengers' health and wellbeing, in order to rebuild consumers’ confidence in the recovery of the air travel industry. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7674115 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control. Published by Elsevier B.V. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-76741152020-11-19 Air travel in a COVID-19 world: Commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures Sotomayor-Castillo, Cristina Radford, Kaitlyn Li, Cecilia Nahidi, Shizar Shaban, Ramon Z. Infect Dis Health Research Paper BACKGROUND: COVID-19 and its associated travel bans have reduced international passenger traffic by over 80% below 2019 levels. If airlines are to resume flying at commercially sustainable levels, they must work to restore passengers confidence and sense of security. This study examined commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and control measures for travel health and safety in the current COVID-19 global pandemic. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted inviting adult members of 39 frequent flyer groups across three social media platforms to participate in an online survey. RESULTS: A total of 205 respondents completed the survey. The majority (75.6%) reported feeling ‘somewhat’ to ‘extremely concerned’ about contracting an infectious disease while flying, particularly respiratory-related. Few (9.8%) reported perceiving their health as an ‘essential priority’ for their preferred airline. Most respondents agreed airlines should provide complimentary hand sanitisers (86.8%), sanitary wipes (82.9%) and masks (64.4%) for passengers to use while flying as well as more information about preventing the spread of infections (90.7%), which would make the majority feel safer to fly. CONCLUSION: COVID-19 has extensively challenged the air travel industry. Passengers have signalled that they expect more from airlines, and that they would actively engage in additional infection prevention and disease control measures while flying. Airlines must ensure passengers about the steps taken to minimize travel-associated risks, and their commitment towards passengers' health and wellbeing, in order to rebuild consumers’ confidence in the recovery of the air travel industry. Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control. Published by Elsevier B.V. 2021-05 2020-11-19 /pmc/articles/PMC7674115/ /pubmed/33303405 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.idh.2020.11.002 Text en © 2020 Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Research Paper Sotomayor-Castillo, Cristina Radford, Kaitlyn Li, Cecilia Nahidi, Shizar Shaban, Ramon Z. Air travel in a COVID-19 world: Commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures |
title | Air travel in a COVID-19 world: Commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures |
title_full | Air travel in a COVID-19 world: Commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures |
title_fullStr | Air travel in a COVID-19 world: Commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures |
title_full_unstemmed | Air travel in a COVID-19 world: Commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures |
title_short | Air travel in a COVID-19 world: Commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures |
title_sort | air travel in a covid-19 world: commercial airline passengers’ health concerns and attitudes towards infection prevention and disease control measures |
topic | Research Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7674115/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33303405 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.idh.2020.11.002 |
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