Can Pre-Flight Testing Help Restore International Travel?

[wowzz]

I see the Canaries are planning to introduce the need for pre- flight testing by mid November, although as yet there are no details as to which test is to be used. The chief concern amongst most travellers appears to be the 72 hour "window" immediately prior to your flight, during which time you must be tested and receive your, hopefully, clear result. This, plus the cost, will drastically reduce the number of tourists to the Canaries, leading to economic hardship especially in islands such as Lanzarote and Fuerteventura which are virtually 100% dependent on tourism.

[vikingivesterled]

Here are some stats. The peoples health institute (FHI) of Norway came out yesterday and said that 25% of they who tested positive with CoVid19 in Norway the last 2 weeks caught it abroad. Mostly people coming into the country to work. While sample only 6% caught it in a bar/restaurant/club. So shutting down or more effectively quarantening international travel will have quadruple the effect of closing all bars, cafes and restaurants. Or nearly double that of closing all other workplaces and universities (16%). As a country it is not difficult to make that choice.

[Station Zero]

Can't see how testing at the border can be any more than a confidence check, the main things are what is the status of the virus transmission in the country coming from or going to, if low prevalence and under control such as NZ to Singapore risk is lower than say someone from the UK where it would be very high risk for Singapore to even contemplate letting free travel without stringent safeguards such as the 14 days quarantine, the capacity to accurately/quickly contract trace and the ability to prevent infected persons from continuing to spread the virus.

So while I can see why airlines want to pursue this as a way to restart more general travel it is also pretty clear why for the most part it is being ignored by governments, especially for those that have actually got control of the situation after initially being burnt as those countries especially would not want to have any work undone by visitors when the rest of the economy is starting to recover.

[wowzz]

The dilemma is difficult to resolve for those regions that rely heavily on the tourist trade, such as the Canaries. Without tourism the economy goes into freefall, with consequent damage to the long term health of the inhabitants. Allow tourists in, economy improves, but with the consequent risk of CV19 infection. Pre-trial testing, whilst by no means perfect, is an attempt to take a middle route.

[Radgirl]

The peoples health institute (FHI) of Norway came out yesterday and said that 25% of they who tested positive with CoVid19 in Norway the last 2 weeks caught it abroad.

the main things are what is the status of the virus transmission in the country coming from or going to, if low prevalence and under control such as NZ to Singapore risk is lower than say someone from the UK where it would be very high risk

Station Zero has hit the nut on the head with the second quote. I have repeatedly said that failing to close borders in Q1 2020 led to the situation we now face and was the biggest failure. Over the summer we also needed to control borders and PCR swabs taken at day 4 onwards can never do more than reduce sensible quarantine to 8 days, but now the UK is at the top of the league and the same as much of europe and the US it makes little difference whether you control the borders or not. Another paper on monday showed no difference at all in infection rates between those that had been abroad and those that had not. Norway is a little different.

So epidemiologically we could simply open the borders and allow free travel while the rate of infection is similar between countries. I see you do not have to quarantine coming to the UK from New Zealand for example, but going the other way is a different story

[PilotLZ]

The EC recently issued some new advise which implies that border control should no longer be a thing within the EU because, with some small exceptions, the situation is pretty bad just about everywhere and imported cases no longer make much of a difference in a situation of widespread and diffused domestic transmission in almost all countries. Of course, it's not a good thing that even countries which had low case numbers over the summer are now exploding with contagion, but elimination was never the strategy of any European country in the first place. So, what's happening now shouldn't be coming as a surprise to anyone.

The moral of the story? I think that the most likely development of the situation is that most of the developed world will eventually divide into two big bubbles, the COVID and the no-COVID ones. The latter will be shared among countries which went for elimination right away and succeeded or are about to succeed in it. Think China, Vietnam, Thailand, New Zealand, Australia... The former will be for everyone else. And coming across from the infectious bubble into the clean one will be subject to quarantine, tests, QR codes and whatnot else. Hard enough to be a deterrent to the vast majority of the travellers.

[vikingivesterled]

That other countries have the same or lower levels of transmission do not matter to the authorities that tries to lover the number of new cases in their own country as long as not all countries are implementing the same rules at the same time to put the brakes on CoVid19. They look at their own numbers and say what kind of interaction is causing the most new cases and what can we do about it. You are going to have a hard time selling to your voters that all bars, cafes, restaurants and toyshops should close but international travel should remain open, if international travel causes four times as many outbreaks as domestic entertainment. Most have accepted that they can't have their foreign holliday this year and that business meetings are now online, but if they can't have their fancy coffe or shop for christmas presents you will have an uproar and a high amount of uncompliance on your hand.

Unfortunately the airline industry is providing a product that currently is seen as more optional than a necessity and that is what goes first in a crisis. In Europe it is not helped either by the airlines pushing prices instead of actively encouraging pandemic restraints like socuial distancing because "it's so difficult and expensive". That attitude is not helping to sell that luxury. When will airlines do something to help themselves out of the crisis instead of insisting on waiting for publically paid help like free preflight testing and scaring many away not by actually filling every seat but having the possibility of a stuffed flight hanging over all potential ticket buyers.

[Longtimer]

In some parts of the world, aviation is a necessarily for supplies, medical evacuation etc, in the rest, most, it is a luxury.

[PilotLZ]

Where about in the world, except for China, Australia and New Zealand, do imported cases make a double-digit percentage of all cases? Even in countries like Greece, where prevalence levels have been low and testing rates have been high ever since the beginning, imported cases accounted for less than 10% pretty much every day over the summer. The elephant in the room is what's going on within the country. Wherever breaches of the safety rules occur, infection rates go up. Quite unfortunately, this often happens on private premises where there's nobody to enforce any rules - and the caution of the hosts goes out of the window rather quickly.

As for some degree of unrestricted foreign travel being allowed during a lockdown within the country, that's becoming increasingly common. Israel were the first country which went into a full-blown second lockdown while allowing its citizens to travel without quarantine to a list of safe countries including Greece, Bulgaria and Croatia. Needless to say, many grabbed the opportunity to spend the lockdown period at the beach rather than stuck at home and almost all flights out of Israel during the lockdown got fully booked quickly. Now something similar is happening in Europe. The borders of a number of countries enforcing major lockdown restrictions have not been closed and are unlikely to. However, inbound tourism doesn't need a border closure to go into hibernation under those circumstances as nobody in their right mind will go on a leisure trip into a country where a curfew is in force and pretty much everything except for farmacies and supermarkets is closed.

[Peter H]

Mutant Covid strain from Spanish farm workers ‘now accounts for most UK cases’
https://twnews.co.uk/gb-news/mutant-...-most-uk-cases
A coronavirus mutation that originated in Spanish farm workers has spread rapidly through Europe and now accounts for most UK cases, a new study suggests.

The variant, called 20A.EU1, is known to have spread from farm workers to local populations in Spain in June and July.

People returning from holidays in Spain over the summer are believed to have played a key role in spreading the strain across Europe.

The study found that in Wales and Scotland the variant accounted for around 80% of cases in mid-September, whereas frequencies in England were around 50% at that time.

Paper: Emergence and spread of a SARS-CoV-2 variant through Europe in the summer of 2020 @ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...063v1.full.pdf

Seems that international travel has had a major influence on covid rates. Not unreasonable to ask if anything in the people/processes involved encourages super-spreader events.

[etudiant]

Dealing effectively with this virus while we do not even now have a clear understanding of how it is transmitted seems unlikely.
Airlines will have a hard time convincing people that travel is safe as long as that uncertainty remains. That suggests this crisis will be resolved only after a vaccine has been proven efficacious.
It will be a two year event in that case at best.

[Maoraigh1]

Were Spanish farmworkers in the UK for fruit and veg harvest? Would they have much contact in Spain with UK holiday tourists?

[Richard Dangle]

"Dealing effectively with this virus while we do not even now have a clear understanding of how it is transmitted seems unlikely.
Airlines will have a hard time convincing people that travel is safe as long as that uncertainty remains. That suggests this crisis will be resolved only after a vaccine has been proven efficacious.
It will be a two year event in that case at best."

Good post.

Although I think you can amplify the "two year event" part. Outside aviation the gradual return to "normality"* will happen more quickly than two years. In many parts of the developed world life will look at lot better as early as February/March 2021...irrespective of the delivery of an effective vaccine. Even the worst case modelling shows the second wave peaking by January at the latest. Super fast testing and ever improved track and trace will do what nature does not.

However, the event duration in aviation terms will be far more "long-tailed" (pun intended). The reasons why have been argued over endlessly on here since March, so I'll merely say 200 odd sovereign states agreeing and lining up all the holes so international air travel can take place smoothly again is going to take time. And that is only one of the factors. In aviation terms two years is optimistic, but optimism is probably a good thing right now (for most of us).

*[air quotes, because I don't believe in the concept of "normal" - the world moves too quickly for that word to have any realistic meaning in this context]

[Peter H]

Richard Dangle

... although there might be a strong seasonal increase in the infection fatality rate early next year. Seasonal diseases and all that (possibly linked to seasonal vitamin D levels).

[PilotLZ]

There's no "old normal" and "new normal", the world is somehow different on every next day due to a number of never-stopping processes. But, as for the "normal" of international travel, which I define as the ability to move between countries without quarantine or any other significant restrictions - I think that next summer will already be somewhat better than this one, with a tendency to go back to something close to what we used to know during the course of 2022-2023. At least in the Western world.

Why? Due to a combination of factors. Advancement in medicine, vaccination of the most vulnerable groups (hopefully as early as Q2 2021 for Europe), cheap and easy to deploy tests which can quickly isolate infected community members and curb further spread. And also the natural course of the pandemic. Even if the virus does not go away completely, it will be eventually managed to a point where it's no longer an overriding concern for any daily activity, including travel. Humankind had managed this a number of times before, including incidences of far more dangerous diseases during times of far less advanced medicine. I see no reason why this time it will be different.

[Recc]

Originally Posted by Maoraigh1

Were Spanish farmworkers in the UK for fruit and veg harvest? Would they have much contact in Spain with UK holiday tourists?

Extremely unlikely that Spanish farm workers (i.e. Spanish nationals) would travel to the UK for work. It possible that migrant workers in Spain would move on to the UK mid to late summer so definitely a plausible route.

On the wider point, the phylogenetic analysis in the study suggests that whilst the 20A.EU1 variant originated in agricultural workers, it was the dominant variant across Spain prior to quarantine travel to the UK. As such, and given the relative numbers, it is much more likely to have been brought back by tourists. To put things in perspective, the paper suggests a minimum of 21 separate introductions to the UK, but that 2/3 of all UK cases in the cluster can be traced back to a single introduction event! Really brings home how much impact rare events can have when you are dealing with highly infectious diseases.

[Richard Dangle]

Pretty much agree with PilotLZ's assessment. The devil - as always - is in the detail though.

"Something close" = perhaps 70% to 80% of passenger traffic at a 20% to 30% increase (in real terms) in average costs/airfares???

This figures are not meant to be an analysis or anything - they are just plucked out of thin air (again, pun intended ). I'm just putting them up there to represent the concept: aviation is not just going though an event, it is also going through a longer term structural change, of yet to be seen size and shape.

As it always was going to do anyway, before any of us had heard of Covid19.

[thethirdfall]

Originally Posted by Peter H;10915328[i

The variant, called 20A.EU1, is known to have spread from farm workers to local populations in Spain in June and July.[/i]

The farm situation is well documented. The mistake that Spain made was in not placing any real controls on how they worked, meaning that the usual slave labour that Spanish farms rely on were yet again housed in cramped and unsanitary conditions. It was a perfect place for such a mutation to take place, and it seems that it was really responsible for a significant amount of damage.

[PilotLZ]

Agreed. Aviation is not a separate phenomenon that's isolated from the overall tendencies in the world. And COVID has accelerated some trends which were already there long before it. For example, long before the crisis it was evident that the glory days of the B747, A340, A380 etc were gone. Now, this has been completely cemented. Smaller aircraft capable of flying more different origin-destination pairs profitably are replacing the behemoths. At the same time, online shopping is taking off big time - and those purchases need to be delivered somehow. Not to mention that some markets (like gadgets) were far smaller 20 years ago. If you only compare the number of phones and tablets shipped these days to the number of electrical appliances shipped in 2000, that's one new market in itself. Also, wealthy European travellers are largely still discovering the beauty of private air travel, as compared to business class on a conventional airline - and interest towards business jet hire or fractional ownership is growing steadily. So, it wouldn't be any surprise if your, mine or anyone else's next job is in cargo or corporate instead of an airline.

That being said and returning to the original topic of traveller testing, I don't think that widespread, quick and cheap testing will be something crafted specifically for travel. Looks like it will be another tool adopted by society in general, with its significance for aviation being a consequence of that rather than an isolated phenomenon. Have a look at Slovakia for example. They tested two-thirds of their population in two days, isolating some 38,000 cases which would have otherwise gone largely undetected. Round two of this experiment is in a week. And, if it proves successful, I think that many other countries or affected areas will follow suit. If this helps in restricting contagion, there's no reason to think of any aviation-specific testing regime as the problem will be addressed on a far larger scale.

[WillowRun 6-3]

Just to add a brief indication of agreement with PilotLZ . . . as recently as the autumn of 2019 one could pick up any of perhaps dozens of officially published ICAO reports and documents, all of which would breezily look ahead to a "doubling of traffic" within some nominally short span of years. It was as if Rosy Scenario, the mocking name given to projections and forecasts issued by economists, had taken up residence for good in the world HQ edifice in Montreal. (IATA too, though somewhat less emphatically, IIRC.)

But cheap shots at ICAO sunny optimism isn't the point this SLF/attorney (with an increasing emphasis on public and private international air law) wants to add here (or before heading over to Jet Blast). Instead ICAO was heavily invested organizationally, it seemed, in CAPSCA, a group of various international and/or professional bodies focused on how international civil aviation could prevent future public health events from becoming epidemics, let alone pandemics, let alone the crippling, eviscerating crisis that has befallen the airline sector worldwide.

This SLF poster has not drilled into what CAPSCA's work program might have put onto websites prior to the COVID pandemic, looking for its own Rosy Scenario in order to take more cheap shots -- at its studied and, evidently, undeniable ineffectiveness writ large. Still, it does seem relevant to ask where CAPSCA so badly missed the salient points in its work until the pandemic struck; perhaps highly relevant to ask. I recall a date when the novel Covid-19 coronavirus was just entering the news, and a public health persona (somewhere between luminary and huckster) posted on social media that the WHO had declared a PHEIC. We all knew what that meant, right? (.......Public Health Emergency of International Concern, a level or two short of....you get the point).

There's a great old Party Joke about Rosy, but like I said, before heading over to Jet Blast where all SLF/attys should go sooner or later.