Read on Twitter
I'm de-whoa'ing this. Here's why (tl;dr I think there were likely multiple infected people on that plane) 1/8
First, 5/13 cases spent 12h in a transit lounge together, i.e., Group 1, (as did 3 additional cases, but in a different lounge, Group 2). 2/8
Second, 6/13 cases from the plane were positive within a couple days of the flight. All but two were positive in w/in four days. But 3/8
Here's where things get a bit annoying, in the epi curve the, "date is based on the earliest available of the following dates: onset of symptoms, diagnosis, laboratory specimen collection, laboratory received date, laboratory reported date or event creation date/notification” 4/8
This means we basically get NO information from that epi curve. Really not sure why they decided to do that. 5/8
Third, the positive individuals were clustered around the bathroom/galleys. The plane might have been at 17% capacity, but if you have a sick person by the bathrooms, I bet that low capacity doesn't matter much (maybe leave rows empty by the toilets?) 6/8
Forth, it's a long flight (I'm longing for even longer flights), but we can't discount 7.5 hours as being a long time. 7/8
I'd close with, my read is that this is an "unlucky" event & not likely generalizable to most flights, BUT it's important to remember that people aren't independent (social networks) & how people are clustered can negative total size restrictions. We need to plan accordingly! 8/8
