Islam T, Lahijani M Sadeghi, Srinivasan A, Namilae S, Mubayi A, Scotch M
Department of Computer Science, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL, USA.
Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Apr 28;8(4):201019. doi: 10.1098/rsos.201019.
Airlines have introduced a back-to-front boarding process in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is motivated by the desire to reduce passengers' likelihood of passing close to seated passengers when they take their seats. However, our prior work on the risk of Ebola spread in aeroplanes suggested that the driving force for increased exposure to infection transmission risk is the clustering of passengers while waiting for others to stow their luggage and take their seats. In this work, we examine whether the new boarding processes lead to increased or decreased risk of infection spread. We also study the reasons behind the risk differences associated with different boarding processes. We accomplish this by simulating the new boarding processes using pedestrian dynamics and compare them against alternatives. Our results show that back-to-front boarding roughly doubles the infection exposure compared with random boarding. It also increases exposure by around 50% compared to a typical boarding process prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. While keeping middle seats empty yields a substantial reduction in exposure, our results show that the different boarding processes have similar relative strengths in this case as with middle seats occupied. We show that the increased exposure arises from the proximity between passengers moving in the aisle and while seated. Such exposure can be reduced significantly by prohibiting the use of overhead bins to stow luggage. Our results suggest that the new boarding procedures increase the risk of exposure to COVID-19 compared with prior ones and are substantially worse than a random boarding process.
航空公司针对新冠疫情推出了从后往前的登机流程。此举的动机是希望降低乘客就座时靠近已就座乘客的可能性。然而，我们之前关于埃博拉病毒在飞机上传播风险的研究表明，感染传播风险增加的驱动力是乘客在等待他人存放行李和就座时聚集在一起。在这项工作中，我们研究了新的登机流程是否会导致感染传播风险增加或降低。我们还研究了与不同登机流程相关的风险差异背后的原因。我们通过使用行人动力学模拟新的登机流程并将其与其他替代方案进行比较来实现这一目标。我们的结果表明，与随机登机相比，从后往前登机使感染暴露风险大致增加了一倍。与新冠疫情爆发前的典型登机流程相比，它也使暴露风险增加了约50%。虽然让中间座位空着可大幅降低暴露风险，但我们的结果表明，在这种情况下，不同的登机流程与中间座位有人时具有相似的相对强度。我们表明，暴露风险增加是由于在过道行走的乘客与就座乘客之间的近距离接触。通过禁止使用头顶行李箱存放行李，这种暴露风险可显著降低。我们的结果表明，与之前的登机流程相比，新的登机程序增加了感染新冠病毒的暴露风险，并且比随机登机流程要糟糕得多。
