Authorities in Ireland may advise against air travel at Christmas, following a study suggesting 59 confirmed cases of COVID-19 could be traced back to a flight into the country during the summer months.
Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tony Holohan, has said “the risk of non-essential travel outside [the] country is simply too high at this moment.”
In the study, published by Eurosurveillance, positive cases of SARS-CoV-2 were detected in passengers and contacts of passengers.
The Eurosurveillance findings appear to contradict previous advice that air travel on commercial flights is safe.
The flight into Ireland lasted seven-and-a-half hours. But it was only 17% occupied — 49 passengers on a 283-seat airplane. There were 12 crew members.
“Thirteen cases were passengers on the same flight to Ireland, each having transferred via a large international airport, flying into Europe from three different continents,” write the study authors. On the flight itself, passengers appear to have been relatively well distanced, apart from those people who may have been traveling as a group.
Some passengers reported spending up to 12 hours overnight in a transit lounge during a stopover, some shared a separate transit lounge, and others had separate short waits of under 2 hours in airport departure areas.
The COVID-19 pandemic will result in fewer airline companies, as a result of firms being taken over or going under, said the head of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) on Friday.
“It is likely that the sector will come out of this crisis smaller than before, which is to say there will be fewer players, who will likely be smaller than before,” he told BFM Business radio.
