AIRLINES ARE TAKING SANITATION SERIOUSLY. BUT THE VIRUS IS STILL SPREADING Last month, two people who were knowingly infected, one from Manila and one from Kuala Lumpur, flew into Hong Kong. Fortunately, Hong Kong is a city that has mandatory testing on arrival, and the two were caught before they mixed with the local population. Gary Leff covered this in a post on View From the Wing, headlined, “People are testing positive for COVID-19. And flying anyway.” Gary’s post also mentions a case of pharmaceutical company Biogen firing an employee who travelled while having the virus from the United States to China. The employee used over the counter medicine to keep her temperature down and therefore evade any temperature scanners. At the same time Emirates made the news for bringing passengers infected with COVID-19 into Hong Kong, and then separately into Perth. The Hong Kong example involved 26 people transferring from Pakistan (where there has been a spike in cases) through DXB and onto Hong Kong. Meanwhile six people with the virus were on the Perth flight. To put that into perspective, those six people represented a two thirds increase in Coronavirus cases in Western Australia. Like other major airlines, Emirates has excellent biosafety procedures. This includes mandatory face masks, thermal scanners at DXB, social distancing when boarding, and of course the cabin crew wear PPE equipment. Nevertheless, infected passengers still managed to make it to Hong Kong and Australia, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to guess that there are many more (on all airlines) infectious passengers still travelling who are never detected, especially if they are asymptomatic.
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AMM A guide - July on testing, 2020 from AMM
