Coronavirus Impact on Air Travel

[Jet II]

Originally Posted by davidjohnson6

Deeply frustrating for those in the transport and travel industries, but having dithered/delayed and generally messed up in Feb/March, the UK has landed in the naughty corner and has to show it can be trusted on disease management instead of holidaying Brits bringing microscopic unwelcome guests to other countries

Not sure how you reach that conclusion as the other countries want UK tourists - France is saying that it will only impose a quarantine on UK visitors if the UK doesn't exempt France from any restrictions.

[helipixman]

Countries are going for the tit for tat approach at the moment, you want us to isolate for 14 days so will you ! This will stop business trips how does a businessman for example do a day troip to France if they have to isolate for 14 days or are countries going to break their own rules ?

Excuse me if I am being thick ! If it comes down to the R rate ! at which the government says its between 0.7 and 1 -- (this is the number of people a person with Covid 19 passes it onto !) Yes you can pass it onto 1 person or at worst more, but how do you pass it onto 0.7 of a person (3/4 of a person) So surely the rate has always got to be 1 or above ?

Equally it was amazing how just before the deadline for 100,000 tests the figures said it was acheived, and again 200,000 by the end of May and the figures suddenly go up again ? Are we being told the truth or just like the Cummings case the gov is just doing what they want and telling us anything.

See rumours that various airlines including TUI were expecting to fly to Spain in mid June (guess that wont happen now). Greece do not want UK tourists, I live in Scotland an area with low cases compared to the rest of the UK and was going to a Greek island a place with almost no cases ! But because we are in the UK and the flight was from Manchester also not allowed. Basically all of this is irrelevant considering the FCO is still advising no non essential travel.

[LTNman]

France has also told anyone crossing the Spanish border to also self isolate for 14 days not that anyone is bothered what the French think after years of travel disruption due to French strikes.

[Link Kilo]

Originally Posted by helipixman

Excuse me if I am being thick ! If it comes down to the R rate ! at which the government says its between 0.7 and 1 -- (this is the number of people a person with Covid 19 passes it onto !) Yes you can pass it onto 1 person or at worst more, but how do you pass it onto 0.7 of a person (3/4 of a person) So surely the rate has always got to be 1 or above ?

You're excused. The R figure will be calculated as the average across the infected population. There'll be some people who don't pass it on to anyone, but some who pass it on to more than one person, hence why a value of less than one is arithmetically possible.

[helipixman]

Link Kilo

Thanks for your explanation, as we all know the gov are great at using percentages ! I watch the daily coronavirus update each day (nothing better to do) and I look at some of their graphs and wonder how they come to these percentages. Normally done by polls etc but not many people about so personally I think lots of the figures are manipulated !

[commit aviation]

helipixman - another way to help get your head around it:
think in terms of 10 people
When R is 1 then 10 people will pass the virus on to 10 other people
When R is 0.7 then 10 people will pass it on to 7 people

All based on a “mythical average” 10 people!

[valefan16]

Sounds like a lot of business and travel leaders are getting together to ask for this quarantine to be scrapped and a document was presented to the government yesterday so have to see how it pans out.

Spain (despite saying no foreign U.K. tourists until October initially) has said via its PM the U.K. is the main target for it to open an air bridge...

Greece (where I’m booked in July) has been suggesting for weeks it wants us, now it doesn’t for the time being so guess we just have to see what pans out.

I expect an EU Air Bridge probably by the start but certainly by July. Surely makes sense only to quarantine if from a high risk country, and expect we won’t be a high risk country in the coming weeks as infections drop. (So much so Oxford are saying they may fail to get a vaccine due to lack of coronavirus in the country!)

[racedo]

Originally Posted by LTNman

France has also told anyone crossing the Spanish border to also self isolate for 14 days not that anyone is bothered what the French think after years of travel disruption due to French strikes.

So it is a good job that strikes on ATC or transport never happen in Spain or anywhere else............................ oh wait they do.

[LTNman]

French ATC see strike action as part of their holiday entitlement. Is there ever a year they don’t strike? Add to that the Ferry workers, rail workers, port workers, fisherman blockades and farmers burning tyres on motorways they have never had an issue with disrupting UK travellers. In fact they pride themselves on it.

[inOban]

It seems that the rate of infection in the London area is now very low. This suggests to me that most of the working population have had the virus and recovered. However that leaves the large number of people, not just the elderly, who have been shielding and are therefore still at great risk.

However in other parts of the country eg the NE, new infections are still rife. Since we can't make separate rules for different parts of the country, we have to progress at the speed of the slowest.

When we consider destination countries, the same applies. Not all areas in Spain for example have had a major outbreak and recovered, and it would be crazy to let visitors set off an outbreak in a susceptible area.

When it comes to countries like Greece which locked down so successfully that they have had few cases, they are very vulnerable to visitors importing the virus.
I'm not sure how making incoming pax from Europe go into quarantine will make much difference.
However obviously there are large areas of the world from which any arrivals ought to be locked down in a secure location. This would include all the Americas, most of Africa, Russia the middle East, India and Pakistan, and even Singapore (which thought it had it under control until they realised that their economy depended even more than ours on a low paid, poorly housed immigrant population)

[alm1]

Just returned from a weekend at sea resort. Don't remember it being so busy at this time of year despite worse than average weather. Vacations with a bit of social distancing do work. We have now single digits daily positive cases in Lithuania so rules are no more than 5 people together, sanitizers everywhere and masks while in shops, public transport and ordering food and drinks at the bar or takeway (but not while sitting at a table), most inside activities still closed. Restaurant tables outside are very busy but almost completely empty inside.
So I think when travel will open soon to similar places abroad people will travel to get warmer weather and sea. But we do not expect to have flights allowed to failed places like UK or Russia anytime soon. And travel by own car might still be preferred.

[The96er]

Originally Posted by alm1

But we do not expect to have flights allowed to failed places like UK or Russia anytime soon.

Why not, you'll have the whole place to your self as everybody has succumbed to the virus and died - apparently !!

[alm1]

Originally Posted by The96er

Why not, you'll have the whole place to your self as everybody has succumbed to the virus and died - apparently !!

"Failed" as agreed by Baltic states for the purpose of opening air travel does have a well defined meaning now - having more that 25 infections per 100 thousand population in the last 14 days.

[FFMAN]

Originally Posted by SWBKCB

Fake science, the linked article below suggests not - there are even arguments for 4 or 6 metres, and that the combination of distance and duration are important.

Are these not the same over-reacting idiots that warned that 600,000 people in the UK would die then cut the number to 200k a few days later and then 20k - can we really take people like that seriously? Here is an out-take from BBC Radio 4 Today's Programme interviewing Professor Robert Dingwall from the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) that advises the govt on CV19:'We cannot sustain [social distancing measures] without causing serious damage to society, to the economy and to the physical and mental health of the population.

'I think it will be much harder to get compliance with some of the measures that really do not have an evidence base. I mean the two-metre rule was conjured up out of nowhere..... there is a certain amount of scientific evidence for a one-metre distance which comes out of indoor studies in clinical and experimental settings. There's never been a scientific basis for two metres, it's kind of a rule of thumb. But it's not like there is a whole kind of rigorous scientific literature that it is founded upon.' This where the WHO gets it's 1m guidance from.
So somewhere along the way, the government decided to ignore the science and go for 2m. It has now been proven to be ineffective compared to lesser impacted countries that used 1.5m but because 2m has been adopted in the UK, the economic damage will be greater and the recovery will be much harder.

We can't 'get rid of the virus' as some seem to believe, any more than you can 'get rid of' nuclear weapons or malaria. We have to learn to take a risk based approach to life. Punishing those at almost no risk (essentially any healthy person under 60) by denying them a job or future or social life, frankly makes life not worth living.

I think we are already seeing a 'Berlin Wall Syndrome' where people will risk anything to get their freedom back.

[SWBKCB]

So the expert you chose to quote is "right"? There can be differing views without the one you disagree with being fake.

[MANFOD]

[QUOTE=FFMAN;10792655] "Are these not the same over-reacting idiots that warned that 600,000 people in the UK would die then cut the number to 200k a few days later and then 20k - can we really take people like that seriously?"

If you are going to keep quoting figures like this, please put them in context. Prof. Ferguson, who admittedly has faced some justifiable criticism, originally suggested 500,000 if no action was taken to suppress or control the virus. It was then reduced to 260,000 (on what basis, I don't recall). The 20,000 was an estimate of deaths if we took very strong lockdown measures. That would appear to be an underestimate, although some might argue that the measures we took were not strong enough.

You previously linked an article in the Spectator a couple of weeks ago which I read with interest. Again, it was just one professional's view and not necessarily any more valid than others who have a differing opinion. The headline to that article was somewhat misleading as his points were rather more nuanced. However, his Maths suggesting that only about 0.1% who get the virus die, did not match with his 15% estimate of folk (which would mean approx.10m) who have had, or have, the virus compared to deaths, which he acknowledged could reach 40,000 (later in the article he mentioned 50,000). I'm sure you can do the maths but I reckon that's 0.4% or 0.5%. I did see a figure reported recently for a European country that had accumulated more data that put the mortality rate to the number of cases as 0.6%.

[harbour cotter]

I have been waiting to book my holiday abroad until everything eased, but I have just booked 3 return trips from Liverpool prior to Christmas. Its viable because now I don't need to self-isolate on return because:

A/ I'm not travelling to the USA or Brazil
B/ Other than the above, its safer abroad
C/ Apparently self isolation is not a 'law' to be broken, merely an 'instruction'.
D/ If its good enough for the Government, even if infected, its good enough for me when i'm not (touch wood)..

[inOban]

FFMAN's post is a clear example of confirmation bias - believing only those conclusions which support your prior belief.

There is also a lot of confusion, even on the BBC as pointed out in the video I linked to before, between the population fatality rate (PFR) which is less than 0.1%, and the mortality rate among those which have been infected (IFR) which is obviously much higher.
The best estimate of the death rate is the number of excess deaths over the 5-year average. This by now must be nearing 50k but may not increase much more.

[ATNotts]

Originally Posted by harbour cotter

I have been waiting to book my holiday abroad until everything eased, but I have just booked 3 return trips from Liverpool prior to Christmas. Its viable because now I don't need to self-isolate on return because:

A/ I'm not travelling to the USA or Brazil
B/ Other than the above, its safer abroad
C/ Apparently self isolation is not a 'law' to be broken, merely an 'instruction'.
D/ If its good enough for the Government, even if infected, its good enough for me when i'm not (touch wood)..

I can't fault your logic! I just hope that given the UK is in a deal worse a situation than most European countries, and much of the Far East, you aren't denied access to the countries you've booked to go to, or be chucked in to quarantine for 14 days by your destination country playing tit for tat with the UK.

[ericlday]

Update from Spanish PM.......
The PM Pedro Sánchez has mentioned the end of June or beginning of July to regain freedom of movement throughout the country and urged the regional presidents to promote national tourism as the one that “pushes and pulls the car” this summer season. The Canary Islands President described this as good news for the Canary Islands but stressed the need for passengers to arrive with negative PCR tests for the COVID-19 virus and always strictly complying with international protocols on health security for tourism, processes that must be approved and applied before the restart of this activity. Torres also added it will be necessary to add a system that allows controlling the traceability of visitors and said, “only then will it be time to open hotels.”