“This is the last time I’ll be flying for a very long time,” Dr. Ethan Weiss tweeted yesterday from a crowded United Airlines flight from Newark to San Francisco. “People on this plane are scared/shocked.”
Dr. Weiss, an associate professor at the University of California San Francisco’s Cardiovascular Research Institute, had just spent two weeks volunteering at New York-Presbyterian Hospital during the COVID-19 crisis. “I am with a group of 25 nurses and doctors who have been working in NYC hospitals for the past 2-4 weeks. We are coming home,” he tweeted. (If you’re interested in learning what Weiss’s experience was like, his journal entries are in his Twitter feed. Here’s Day One.)
Since early April, United Airlines has been providing free round-trip flights to New York City for medical volunteers who wanted to help fight against the COVID-19 crisis.
Yesterday, Weiss tweeted a selfie that shows his jam-packed plane, with every seat on the 737 aircraft filled.
I guess @united is relaxing their social distancing policy these days? Every seat full on this 737 pic.twitter.com/rqWeoIUPqL
— Ethan Weiss (@ethanjweiss) May 9, 2020