The aviation and holiday industry are due to hold urgent talks with government this week in a bid to bring coronavirus testing to airports.
Sadly the obvious scenario, which TravelSafe Systems have attempted to point out, is close to becoming a reality. A start-stop-start-stop highly disruptive “bringing back” of the airline sector and tourism. The virus was spread and still is being spread rapidly by aviation. Spain is facing new outbreaks and British tourists may now have to quarantine on return or worse recently booked holidays get cancelled as lock downs and flight bans come into force.
Another report from the BBC yesterday covered the Wellcome Trust director Prof Sir Jeremy Farrar who told the House of Commons’ Health Committee “things will not be done by Christmas”. He went on to say humanity would be living with the virus for “decades”. Lifting travel restrictions without proper controls will cause new outbreaks.
The case reported yesterday in The Daily Mail of a British Tourist testing positive on arrival in Lanzarote clearly plays out the problem. The couple have to quarantine but who else on the plane, bus, taxi to the hotel or at the hotel need to also? It is not obvious that if a country has infections nobody should get into an airport without a valid test?
This was the scene yesterday at London Heathrow with people standing in queues like this for over 1.5 hours.
The TSS solution is ten times more accurate than PCR (quoted in the BBC article), four times faster and can be three times less expensive. It also integrates with a privacy complaint secure mobile phone application which can be used with airport passenger processes.
If airlines and airports want their business to return in a sustainable way they need to re-think their approaches to date and it seems there is some hope for that.
Making travel safe again 