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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 backto-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 

Public health advisories recommend against the use of the N95 respirator by the general public in the current COVID-19 pandemic. These advisories are primarily motivated by the collective goal of reducing the reproduction number to below one. However, cultural factors may dissuade the public from adopting recommendations from models optimized for the collective good. This article presents a discussion of mathematical issues that ought to guide an advisory from an individualistic perspective. In particular, we argue that the public health advisory does not appear justified if one considers non-linearity in the dose-response relationship and heterogeneity in infection load in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The N95 respirator promises far greater effectiveness than homemade or surgical masks. However, due to a considerable variation in masks’ brands and efficiencies, the public should look into the specific details of each available mask option.