Tag Archives for coronavirus.
A rumor started flying in Texas this weekend that we’d see another lock down in the face of rising Covid-19 spread when a former judge and Jefferson County district attorney as well as assistant US Attorny for the Eastern District of Texas posted to Facebook that the governor had texted him it was time to stock up on essentials again.
U.S. airlines tell the U.S. government they cannot do temperature checks themselves (Frontier notwithstanding), but at the same time U.S. airlines are already doing temperature screening on their flights to Canada.
An internal American Airlines memo details how customers will be handled if they show a 100.4 degree temperature or above.
Airlines say if the government turns someone away for a fever, they’ll refund the customer’s ticket. Making someone with a fever show up at the airport potentially infecting others in order to qualify for a refund seems like a really dumb idea.
Some scientists say smell tests could be a better approach..
It’s the regime uncertainty as much as restrictions themselves that are damaging to travel at the moment. It’s tough to buy a ticket when travel restrictions may change after you make your purchase. And it’s tough to fly when you may be forced to quarantine for two weeks at your additional expense after potential exposure to someone with the virus.
Airlines will be handing out quarantine forms for passengers to fill out when entering New York. Governor Cuomo also wants “a customs-like check-in at the airport” for domestic flights.
The forms will be used to enforce New York’s quarantine of arriving domestic passengers from states with “a positive test rate higher than 10 per 100,000 residents over a 7-day rolling average or a state with a 10 percent or higher positivity rate over a 7-day rolling average.”
Australia has fewer than 8500 total confirmed cases of COVID-19. The country’s success appears to be a combination of effective policy response and luck.
International arrivals of their own citizens required quarantine. But it’s those quarantine facilities that are the site of a new virus outbreak in Melbourne – and also of a sex scandal. Because the guards were having sex with the passengers being quarantined, and exposing themselves to the virus.
The rate of growth in air travel has slowed. Forward bookings actually fell after 8 straight weeks of growth. And travel searches are down.
Aeroflot has been circumventing the Russian government’s ban on international passenger flights, according to media reports, by selling tickets to passengers on flights officially labeled as cargo-only.
This has included “flights to New York, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Seoul and Tel Aviv since at least early June” according to airline sources.
One of the reasons TSA temperature checks at airports are a bad idea is that they won’t end after the pandemic. They’ll become the new normal. Just like all of the new rules put in place after 9/11.
We need to stop acting like it’s February or March, when we didn’t know much about spread of the virus. As the CDC says, “Most viruses and other germs do not spread easily on flights because of how air circulates and is filtered on airplanes.”
Your bigger risks are in the airport, and at security checkpoints, than in the air. For most of us, though, we don’t need to fear air travel.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
