You Might Not Catch Coronavirus On an Airplane. But Air Travel Is Still Probably Spreading COVID-19

It’s a very good time to be a domestic jet-setter on a budget. JetBlue’s fall sale, which took place in early August, featured tickets as low as $20 for trips between New York City and Detroit or Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Alaska Airlines recently offered a buy-one-get-one sale, a deal more familiar to Payless shoe shoppers than air travelers. United Airlines passengers could recently book themselves a round-trip from Newark, N,J. to Ft. Myers, Fla.—a major viral hotspot—for as little as $6, before taxes and fees hiked the price to a staggering—wait for it—$27. All of this, of course, assumes that you’re willing to risk exposure to COVID-19, a virus that has killed more than 170,000 Americans as of this week. These deals exist because of a variety of reasons that have combined to send the U.S. aviation industry into bizarro mode. First and foremost, airlines are hurting badly. Air travel is down about 66%, judging by the number of people who passed through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints on Aug. 16 compared to the same number from a year prior; the four biggest U.S. airlines lost a combined $10 billion between April and June, the Associated Press reports. Second, many airlines have only survived and avoided mass layoffs because they took pandemic-specific grants and loans from the federal government as part of the CARES Act, passed in March. Airlines that took that money are forbidden from mass layoffs until Octobe...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news