Reviving Florida Tourism: DeSantis Says Air Travel Is Safe

By M.G. Alison. First Posted: Aug 29, 2020 05:24 AM EDT

Reviving Florida Tourism has made Governor Ron DeSantis urging people to get on the plane as air travel is now safe.

DeSantis held a roundtable at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on August 28 with JetBlue and Spirit Airlines executives, and others involved with operations there and at Miami International Airport, to send a message that air travel is now safe.

Earlier this week, DeSantis held a similar event with executives of theme parks in an effort to revive Florida's economy, which is very much dependent on tourism.

According to DeSantis, the airline industry's impact on Florida's economy reaches up to more than $175 billion in a year, as per an NPR.org report.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, international travel at the two biggest airports in Southern Florida, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Miami International Airport, has dropped to 85 percent from last year.

From March to June, the number of people flying into Florida was down to 8.8 million from 24 million. The drop has caused airline industries and other industries, depending on it, to lose billions of dollars.

The Florida governor said he, himself, was not comfortable about air travel initially, especially that there is still the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, it is a fact that there have been no reports of wide transmissions of the disease in an airplane, declared DeSantis.

In a report by the Miami Herald, DeSantis, aiming to revive Florida tourism, said that people should understand that there have been no reports of outbreaks being caused by airplanes.

Previously, DeSantis had blamed flights to have brought COVID-19 into Florida.

Airplanes Safe, But Not Airports

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), air travel puts a person at high risk of getting infected with COVID-19 because passengers spend lining up in airport terminals and time in security.

However, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Michael Mina, an expert on infectious disease, said the concern is mostly with the airports and not so much with airplanes because they have high airflow and air exchange.

According to a report on the Sun Sentinel, the CDC also noted that most viruses do not easily spread on flights because of how airplanes circulate and filter the air.

However, the CDC further noted that air travel will still put a person at high risk of getting the disease because it will be difficult to maintain social distancing on a crowded flight.

A crowded flight would mean that passengers will not be able to sit six feet apart from each other, which means that they will be in close proximity for hours.

Public Health Sciences professor Jose Szapocznik at the University of Miami's medical school also warned about being in airports. But Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International CEO of Aviation Mark Gale pointed out that the airport terminals are clean.

There is no question that air travel is key to reviving Florida tourism, but will it be entirely safe.