ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has added an entirely new dimension to flight education and training, thus highlighting the importance of understanding student perceptions of training in the close quarters of small, piston aircraft. Schools and institutions across the world have developed cleaning procedures and policies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 while continuing collegiate programs. Flight schools face a greater challenge relating to the sanitization and the scheduling of an aircraft because social distancing in a light training aircraft is impossible, and an aircraft is particularly challenging to clean because of sensitive equipment and numerous touch surfaces. We used a stratified cluster sample of Part 141 collegiate flight students from the core Aeronautics courses to recruit participants at all levels of training for a questionnaire. Ninety-seven responses were collected. The within-subjects design presented four aircraft sanitization scenarios in a random order to each participant to determine willingness to pilot (Rice et al., 2020) under various sanitization procedures: (1) assignment to an aircraft at random with no sanitization or scheduling procedures, (2) assignment to an aircraft at random with an Instructor who is responsible for the cleaning of the aircraft with alcohol wipes, (3) assignment to an aircraft that is specifically assigned to the same Instructor and his/her students, and (4) assignment to an aircraft that is specifically assigned to the same Instructor and his/her students every day and Instructor who is responsible for the cleaning of the aircraft with alcohol wipes. Sanitization scenarios with more precautions resulted in a higher willingness to pilot measurements.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: In December 2019, a new type of coronavirus, called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), appeared in Wuhan, China. Serious outbreaks of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, have occurred throughout China and the world. Therefore, we intend to shed light on its potential clinical and epidemiological characteristics. METHODS: In this retrospective study, we included 50 confirmed fatal cases of SARS-CoV-2 reported on Chinese official media networks from January 16, 2020, to February 5, 2020. All the cases were confirmed by local qualified medical and health institutions. Specific information has been released through official channels. According to the contents of the reports, we recorded in detail the gender, age, first symptom date, death date, primary symptoms, chronic fundamental diseases, and other data of the patients, and carried out analyses and discussion. RESULTS: In total, 50 fatal cases were reported: median age was 70 y old, and males were 2.33 times more likely to die than females. The median number of days from the first symptom to death was 13, and that length of time tended to be shorter among people aged 65 and older compared with those younger than 65 (12 days vs 17 days; P = 0.046). Therefore, the older patients had fewer number of days from the first symptom to death (r = -0.40; P = 0.012). CONCLUSIONS: In our study, we found that most of the deaths were elderly men with chronic fundamental diseases, and their COVID-19 progression to death time was shorter. At the same time, we demonstrated that older men are more likely to become infected with COVID-19, and the risk of death is positively correlated with age.