Preparing to traveling during infectious times

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Travel in the Times of Corona

4 min readMar 12, 2020

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I almost named this Love in the time of Corona, but I guess this will be more about travel than love, although they come together in this trip (aw/ew).

So, I’m not gonna lie. I’m definitely an analytical person, or a blue person, as Thomas Erikson would say (recommend! even if you don’t believe in putting people into categories). I over-analyze and over think almost any aspect of my life, and well, this well planned trip to South America was one of them.

We booked in January, and have been super excited up until a few days ago. My partner is still excited. I am too. But I admit I’m also a bit terrified. If it was (were? #ESL) possible, I would maybe postpone this trip a bit, but on the other hand, maybe I didn’t try hard enough?

One way or another, the few days leading to departure have become much more stressful than usual, with the exponential growth of (official ones anyway — some interesting reading here and listening here) infections everywhere, intense news coverage (which I tend to over-consume, but omg did you see Johns Hopkins’ dashboard?), and elbow-bumping becoming an actual thing. And so, I went into a mini-loop of research and understanding the best practices for travelling safely, looking for masks but learning they’re not beneficial at this point assuming we’re not carrying the virus, and focusing on other methods of prevention.

Research by Weiss (Penn State) and Hertzberg (Emory). Figures available on https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/01/how-coronavirus-spreads-on-a-plane/

For flight safety, there’s some really good information that I found on NatGeo. Apparently (maybe unsurprisingly), research has been done on how diseases spread on planes. The first myth to break is about the circulated air — air on airplanes is filtered with hospital grade filters (HEPA), where 99% of microbes are captured, and the filtering happens every few minutes. So it’s actually cleaner air than what you’d breath on a bus, train or metro system. The risk on planes, like anywhere else, is touching contaminated surface and then passing it on to your face (like my fav emoji 🤦‍♀). I’m not going to vomit back everything I read, but the chart above provided some useful insight so I’ll leave it there with the reference for you to browse (also, seatguru.com are you listening?).

As a face-toucher (my own face, that is), I’d have to challenge myself to decrease it to the minimum (maybe hot pepper fingers? 🌶️); I’ve found some alcohol pads for disinfection in a small pharmacy, we’ll use those to disinfect hard surfaces on the airplanes as we settle in; I got some latex gloves to disinfect with (and I suggested using those all the time in airports, but so far have been shut down by OJ) and some mini-Purells and a bigger one, to refill.

I guess that’s traveling in the times of corona!

It’s the morning of the flight(s) now, and we just learned that flights from Europe to the US have been stopped for a month. So, that’s taking away some stress for sure (NOT).

I’m excited but also still concerned about so many aspects:

how infectious are airports?
how weird is it to disinfect things around me in public?
how many corona-carriers are going to be on board our flights?
is it coronavirus, Coronavirus, Corona virus, or something else altogether?
does the virus actually not do well in warm weather?
what if one of us has it already and it will hit us during the trip?
what if Trudeau decides to ban travel between Canada and other countries?
how likely is it that we’ll be left stranded for a few months thousands of kilometres from our current home, and from our home countries?

and honestly, some more.

So — I’ll write about this experience, assuming I’ll survive it, when I feel like writing and connecting back to the world, and it’ll hopefully help me deal with the stress of living it and make vacay more fun. Very meta, right?

Useful resources:

Preparing to traveling during infectious times

Written by Guy Tsror