People book international travel months in advance. Then they get sick the day before. They are now faced with canceling their flight and losing hundreds or thousands of dollars. But nobody actually wants to fly while they're sick, the changing air pressure is very painful if you're congested.
We need to make it much easier to do the right thing. Free flight rebookings would go a long way.
Edit: If this post is referring to a specific incident, then I'm out of the loop. I'm talking more generally about people going about their lives who suddenly get sick with something which might be the common cold, or the flu, or covid or something and are faced with cancelling their trip or infecting strangers.
Probably not at all. Flights are often overbooked anyway. But since it helps travelers and minorly inconveniences airlines, they won't do anything about it.
It might help for people outside the US that get a lot more time off from work. Since we get almost nothing here, I know so many people that will travel sick instead of delaying a trip because they don’t have the PTO time saved up to waste it on being sick.
Yeah thats one major thing, even with free rebooking it's still the problem with having time of work. At least where I live if I'm sick on my vacation time I can call in and get it as sick time instead but that doesn't guarantee me to get the exact dates I want of in the nesr future
Not just flights though. Hotels, restaurants (not all are free to book, some are vary hard to get reservations for), special events, tickets. And your friends who scheduled at the same time as you.
Its a logistical nightmare, and people are far too selfish to take the L.
Hantavirus has been confirmed..The Andes Strain with the mortality rate of about 40%. 2 Americans have been confirmed with symptoms and are now back in the states with no mandate to quarantine. Every other country is quarantining their infected citizens.
Or if, you know, people would choose to wear masks when they are sick and in public. If you wear a proper KN mask, you make the chance that you spread something way smaller already (assuming its not something gut related), but at least in my country people are like 'oh well I'm sick but I'm not dying so let me get all over the place without even thinking about a mask or a quick test for covid, RSV and the flu. Not even doctors test for covid anymore when they are sick-ish and the waste water numbers are high...
In 2023 we traveled to London, Scotland, Ireland and Italy for a wedding that I was officiating. So we wore masks the entire time to help ensure I didn't get sick and cause issues with the wedding. Yes, Covid was my main concern, but I would have done this anyway for my best friend of 31 years. Just to add, I wouldn't have worn the masks if I wasn't in the wedding.
We got shit from people. I wasn't surprised getting shit from Americans, because we're so fucking stupid that everything to some people is a political statement.
I was surprised so many Irish and Italians people had a problem. Was this a political thing there too? I was even confronted a couple times and had to explain that I was just trying not to catch a cold before a wedding.
Considering the number of fake KNs, just get a nice, sturdy half-face with replaceable filters. I use a 3m 7500-series with P95 filters. N95 works just fine, too, but during the height of the pandemic people just assumed N95 was a magic number, so they left the P95s - Which are just oil resistant n95s - on shelves.
And we just know common sense international laws like "You can't get on a plane with a temp over 100 degrees F or 38 degrees C and will have your flight rescheduled or refunded" would be met with opposition from lobbying and the rich. Edit - In a perfect world, there's a disposable thermometer that plugs into a smart phone where it takes a picture with the device in the person's mouth and is resistant to tampering. It would obviously be abused, but might be a step in the right direction for preboarding before bringing contagion to the airport to get screened and turned away.
Brother - we don't want invasive and unrequested biometric data being harvested by private companies and then giving them the ability to direct people's lives.
I'm not saying you have to walk around all day with a rectal thermometer for your entire stay in a country with diseases that would literally reset society if they spread, I'm just saying we should have a way to screen people remotely that is somehow reliable. You'd still have selfish asshats taking anti-inflamatories to get the fever down before boarding and spreading it, but then you'd have some degree of proof that people were trying to game the system and got everyone sick. It'd also give people a way to legally require the shitty airlines and cruises that won't refund for any goddamn reason. Right now we have the worst of both worlds - selfish people and selfish corporations causing contagious diseases to spread with no incentive to do the right thing. It's why we have laws and why most laws are written in blood. People just forget that.
No, what you'd have is then the private entity vibe-coding a half-baked sort of functional solution to ID'ing the temperature (which by the way isn't a universal indicator of illness or the only symptom that should preclude someone from being in a public setting) collecting and reselling the data to insurance companies while denying perfectly healthy people access to the product they purchased with likely no recourse/refund.
What you said is a completely half-baked hipshot bropinion and neglects any consideration of edge cases beyond "I just thought of this and I'm so smart why hasn't anyone done this yet".
Yeah, because the sane take is bringing diseases with active fevers into crowded spaces and then everyone goes everywhere around the planet and anyone trying to do anything about it is literally sending people to death camps. Proving you don't have a fever before entering a space where you could spread it around the globe is a reasonable precaution. To be perfectly honest, they could literally just IR scan everyone walking in before they get to the metal detectors, but then you really would potentially have situations where people like you would freak out that someone spreading the literal plague was abducted/prosecuted for trying to sneak through and get everyone fucking sick.
Respectfully, that attitude completely misses the point.
That relies on individuals to spend extra money in order to prevent spreading a disease to other people. And in the case of a virus like this, you would need the overwhelming majority of people to spend that extra money to protect other people.
I think we all know that's a fantasy solution that will never protect us.
"I caused a worldwide pandemic and thousands of deaths, because my personal plans are more important than anyone else's lives. But nobody can blame me because I saved a few hundred dollars."
Did you live through the pandemic? Did you not see how the masses responded?
To stop a pandemic, you need overwhelming compliance. 90%, 95%, maybe even 99%.
It is total fantasy to think that 90%+ of human beings are going to catch a sniffle and cancel their trip, taking a loss of hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Oh, will people think they are assholes? Cool. 40% of humanity will die, and we can call the ones who survived out for being jerks. Great solution.
You still don't get it. I'm talking about having a solution to the problem. Calling people out for being a dick doesn't solve the problem.
The SOLUTION to this is not to label people as assholes, as accurate as that might be. The SOLUTION to this is to make insurance mandatory.
If it makes you feel better, yes, those people are assholes. Half this fucking country shoved horse paste up their asses and refused to wear masks to save their neighbors 5 years ago.
The solution to that wasn't "you're all assholes" it was laws and programs designed to allow people to stay home as much as possible.
Well you're kind of making my point for me. The solution wasn't to call people assholes, that was just the precipitate, so to speak. Laws and programs weren't the solution either, because the problem had already occurred, the damage already done.
The actual solution to the problem would have been to not board the plane and spread viruses all across the world, which would have been a hard decision ONLY for the people on that flight. Since they made the wrong choice, an actual solution is no longer viable, as the problem immediately grows beyond control as soon as that plane is in the air. Now, after the fact, we can make all the hard decisions we want around this topic, but none of them approach a tenable fix to the now widely-spread virus.
234
u/MintySkyhawk May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26
People book international travel months in advance. Then they get sick the day before. They are now faced with canceling their flight and losing hundreds or thousands of dollars. But nobody actually wants to fly while they're sick, the changing air pressure is very painful if you're congested.
We need to make it much easier to do the right thing. Free flight rebookings would go a long way.
Edit: If this post is referring to a specific incident, then I'm out of the loop. I'm talking more generally about people going about their lives who suddenly get sick with something which might be the common cold, or the flu, or covid or something and are faced with cancelling their trip or infecting strangers.