The International Air Transport Association (IATA), an international organization that brings together hundreds of airlines from all over the world, he asked that a protocol is approved to replace the currently mandatory 14-day quarantine for passengers in many countries with a rapid test system to detect the presence of the coronavirus. IATA hopes to be able to save some of the revenues of the winter season, which are expected to be much lower than normal, after a couple of quarters in which air transport has already lost millions of passengers due to the many restrictions in place around the world.
Alexandre de Juniac, director of IATA, proposed introducing mandatory antigen tests for all passengers before they board flights. These are so-called “rapid tests”, which detect the presence of a substance (the viral antigen) in a saliva sample, indicating whether the person is infected. Those for COVID-19 have been in experimentation for months now, and already adopted in many contexts and countries, because they provide a result in a short time (even just 15 minutes), they are easy to administer (unlike tampons, for which the medical personnel) and are economical.
However, there is still a great deal of debate going on about the reliability of the rapid tests. In general, if an antigen test is positive the result is quite reliable, but if it is negative it may not have detected the presence of the infection (and therefore be a false negative). According to de Juniac, on the other hand, there are no major problems in the reliability of rapid tests, and he assured that within a few weeks they will be able to discover “virtually all cases”: an infected passenger would even have only 0.023 percent chance of escape scrutiny, according to the IATA.
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But the plan, eventually, should be approved by the UN International Aviation Organization, and by individual governments that for the moment seem very cautious about the mass introduction of rapid tests, which tend to be very promising but not yet completely safe.
The current problem of the civil aviation sector is that there are few passengers and consequently few flights because there is a widespread fear of taking planes, for fear of infections, but also because in many countries a mandatory quarantine of 14 days to arrive, a condition that discourages the vast majority of leisure or business trips. In June the IATA he had estimated that the losses for the sector will total 84 billion dollars globally, with passengers practically halved compared to 2019 according to the forecasts of the Airports Council International, an association that represents the operators of civil airports.
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Until a few weeks ago, airlines seemed to want to focus on a system of tampons made in advance on passengers, a couple of days before boarding, which however would require much more complex preparation. Meanwhile these days they have begun Alitalia’s connections between Rome and Milan that provide for a coronavirus test for those who board: these are two flights a day between Fiumicino and Linate, whose passengers are subjected to a rapid test immediately before departure, or alternatively they may have the result of a negative swab done in the previous three days.
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