Airlines are taking sanitation seriously. But the virus is stil 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.

The elephant in the room - airlines spread the virus

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: Airlines have been - and still are - unwitting and unwilling conduits of COVID-19.

Before there was wide awareness about COVID-19, the disease went from China to Europe, through normal commercial flights.

A BBC investigation even claims that Iran’s Mahan Air spread COVID-19 throughout the Middle East and beyond as flights to China, including to Wuhan, seem to have continued into March.

For example, the BBC reports that the first recorded case of COVID-19 in Lebanon was on 21 February from a woman returning on a pilgrimage from the city of Qom, and that she flew back to Beirut on Mahan Air.

Mahan Air is not typical of other major airlines, for one thing the airline is alleged to have links with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

However, as the Emirates examples show, it doesn’t matter how good your HEPA filters are, or how stringent the face mask rules at the airport and on-board. People are still getting through.

Even New Zealand, which was Coronavirus free for 24 straight days, suddenly had two new cases on June 16th. How? Thanks to two returning New Zealanders coming back from the UK - of course by air. Like everyone else arriving in the country, the two went into quarantine.

However the pair were released early for compassionate family reasons and drove for 650km from Auckland to Wellington before being diagnosed.

If airlines are seen as spreaders of COVID-19, it’s not a surprise that some Governments are taking a tough line on their return.

On June 30th, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacina Ardern said calls to reopen the country’s borders were “dangerous.”

Meanwhile the Scottish Government was initially out of step with its UK counterparts in authorising air bridges. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said that “we have to guard against importing cases of the virus here”, before eventually agreeing to green light a list of 57 countries.

Finally, as we were putting this issue together, there was controversy as Hong Kong introduced mandatory testing for arriving airline crew members, who had previously been exempt. The city had seen an increase in cases of COVID-19, and airline crew were obviously seen as a gap by which the virus could get into Hong Kong, given that passengers are already being tested.