61 people on two flights to NL from SA test positive for Covid. How?

[Tryingtryingandtrying]

Aren't they supposed to test before flying? Or are they all vaccinated and therefore not mandatory, but they have chosen not to? This is a really high number, much higher than I would have thought, must be pushing 10% of passengers and that is before it has spread to the others?

@Benjispruce5

On planes you can remove masks to eat and drink so people take their time over eating and drinking if they don’t like to wear a mask. Especially on a long flight.

Dh flies a lot for work. He says that it’s commonplace on Ryanair flights for people to preorder drinks for the flight so that they have an excuse to remove their masks for the flight.

There were British people on the flight, they took connecting flights but apparently they have been mandated to isolate at home for 10 days with day 2 and day 10 pcr tests with t&t plaguing them with calls. They were interviewed (phone)

Dh flies a lot for work. He says that it’s commonplace on Ryanair flights for people to preorder drinks for the flight so that they have an excuse to remove their masks for the flight

I don’t doubt that is true, question is does it make that environment any more or less risky than being stood in a pub or sat in a busy cafe or restaurant?

How about we finally give up the fairy tale that masks, testing. lockdowns and god knows what else can actually stop this?

We are seeing time and time again that the virus will find a way, no matter what.

I have my 3 jabs and been complaint with hand washing so I am not anti-vaccine or a vaccine denier, but at this stage I think we need to be realistic and stop pretending.

All we can do is keep improving the vaccines and develop more drugs that will eventually help those who catch the virus. That's all.

And remind ourselves that the majority of people will only mild or no symptoms at all.

Enough with the wishful thinking and the hysteria.

ApplesAreTheBaneOfMyLife Sat 27-Nov-21 13:11:05
Dh flies a lot for work. He says that it’s commonplace on Ryanair flights for people to preorder drinks for the flight so that they have an excuse to remove their masks for the flight.

How exactly is this any different to any pub here?

Ryanair don't fly to SA.

@notimagain

I didn't say 'safe' BTW, I said safer than other places. Amazing how many people I know won't fly because it's 'so dangerous' but have no problem sitting in a packed Wetherspoons or crammed onto a packed tube carriage on a Saturday night.

Yup, fly into LHR having social distanced at departure airport (‘cos many foreign airports are still keen on that) masked most/all of the flight, movement in aisles restricted as much as possible…e-gates on arrival …so ping through …….and then …..board TfL bus or the Piccadilly line and think ……

100%.

When I've flown abroad, the most danger I've ever felt was on the way to and from the airport, on a train packed full of maskless people.

RaisinFlapjack

A virus that kills 1 in 100 of those it infects but infects 50% of the population will kill more people than one which kills 4 in 10 but only infects 10%.

Have you missed a zero in your example (or has my brain stopped working)?

@RaisinFlapjack
@Tryingtryingandtrying@Seadragonusgiganticusmaximus

A virus that kills 1 in 100 of those it infects but infects 50% of the population will kill more people than one which kills 4 in 10 but only infects 10%.

For a population of 100

the first (1% fatality of 50 people) = .5 person

the second (40% fatality of 10 people) = 4 people

@TheShoeLady

Apparently he did have to show “intention to book a test” or some bullshit

You need to complete a passenger locator form to be able to travel to the UK.

The PLF requires a reference code you can only obtain by booking and paying for a test, which is then registered specifically to you and has to be completed within 2 days of arrival.

No completed PLF, no getting into UK or even onto a plane to the UK, and the airlines are very strict on that as they're responsible to the government for anyone they transport to the UK.

How about we finally give up the fairy tale that masks, testing. lockdowns and god knows what else can actually stop this?

It’s never been about stopping, it’s been about slowing it down so the hospitals can cope should you need treatment.

@TheShoeLady

My DP just got back from SA - feeling thankful that he hadn’t booked his tickets a couple of days later! He didn’t have to test pre return flight (although he did on the way out). It seems the UK doesn’t give a shit and just lets people in Willy nilly. Apparently he did have to show “intention to book a test” or some bullshit, but having already had contact with me, his kids his ex, and anyone he’s passed on the way home, the “intention to test” is a pretty pointless requirement. He’s also been invited to a big two day meeting including a social evening next week for work. HR has advised him that it might look better if he doesn’t go! If he does go and turns out he has the SA variant or indeed any other form of covid that could be a lot of ruined Christmases. All for the sake of a bloody test. The whole thing is a joke.

Why didn't he take a test? It may not have been a requirement but surely he could have done it to protect everyone he has come home to?

@anniegun Indeed! Or do what work are advising and not go to the work thing...?

I absolutely do not understand the British thing of everything needing to be someone else's responsibility. A pre-departure test might well have not picked up on a newly acquired infection, and this variant is very new. Surely the responsible thing is to take a PCR test and isolate for a few days? Whatever happened to common sense? Why would he go to a work do knowing he's just come back from a high risk area and then blame the government if he infected people? It's baffling.

@dabbydeedoo its not just a British thing, it is the culture of an individualistic nation. Do you want people to take more responsibility? Then our culture needs to change to one that looks at the collective good, rather than individuals. In that culture, everyone wears masks anyway when they have a respiratory infection.

@madroid - typo, that should have read 4 in 100 not 4 in 10

[quote julieca]@dabbydeedoo its not just a British thing, it is the culture of an individualistic nation. Do you want people to take more responsibility? Then our culture needs to change to one that looks at the collective good, rather than individuals. In that culture, everyone wears masks anyway when they have a respiratory infection.[/quote]
It's particularly British to think the government should have to tell you what to do at all times. How could someone possibly thing it's the government's fault that her husband would choose to come home from South Africa, not do a test, and then mingle with a bunch of people?

It's particularly British to think the government should have to tell you what to do at all times.

The British government has micromanaged everyone's decisions about how to deal with covid to the point that the British now run out and do anything that is permitted, even when it goes against common sense. It is the height of irony to now blame people for being like that.

@Tryingtryingandtrying

No reason to assume British flights any different, but obv we don't actually know as they all just went home.

Exactly. And still those flights are coming in til Sunday 4am aren’t they, for UK nationals. Madness

How many flights from the same destinations landed in the UK and were not held back whilst that plane was stopped from the docking I wonder.

The jabs are a red herring so completely irrelevant. Ditto masks, social distancing, hand gel and “asymptotic infection”.

In each cubic meter of air, there are between 1.6 million and 40 million viruses. Given that we breathe roughly .01 cubic meters of air each minute, a simple calculation based on these results suggests we breathe in a few hundred thousand viruses every minute. There is no magic solution for this other than holding your breath! Even BSL-4 (biosafety level 4) lab conditions aren’t always enough.

And yet somehow we are not all riddled with viral infections? If run at enough cycles, the PCR test is sensitive enough to detect a single virus particle. It could even be broken or already neutralised by your immune system.

The issue lies solely in conflating a positive PCR test with a “case”.

This is actually good news in 8 days if none of them are seriously I'll it will be a good way to show this is a good mutation. Evidence out of SA is it's more cold like, highly transmissible it could be over in weeks if we let it go

Have you seen the photo of them waiting for their tests? All in a lounge with no one wearing a mask. Which means they could test negative but all have caught it from just being in the same room. They should all isolate anyway as positive contacts on the plane if they’re serious about stopping the spread through Europe

@dabbydeedoo perhaps yes. But it also fits in with the idea of prioritising yourself over others, which plenty on MN support (I don't).

@DoormatBob

So this new variant is so dangerous all these people didn't even know they had it? I assume none of them appeared to be terribly ill?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist of anti vaxxer but it doesn't seem to make much sense anymore.

There's no indication at this point that it causes more serious illness. There are anecdotal reports of it causing very mild illness in fact but we would need more data to confirm that.

Personally, I'm not going to give in to the media's scaremongering until we know what kind of disease it causes.

Dr Angelique Coetzee said she was first alerted to the possibility of a new variant when patients in her busy private practice in the capital Pretoria started to come in earlier this month with Covid-19 symptoms that did not make immediate sense.

They included young people of different backgrounds and ethnicities with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate, she said. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell.

“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” said Dr Coetzee, a GP for 33 years who chairs the South African Medical Association alongside running her practice.

On November 18, when four family members all tested positive for Covid-19 with complete exhaustion, she informed the country’s vaccine advisory committee.

She said, in total, about two dozen of her patients have tested positive for Covid-19 with symptoms of the new variant. They were mostly healthy men who turned up “feeling so tired”. About half of them were unvaccinated.
“We had one very interesting case, a kid, about six years old, with a temperature and a very high pulse rate, and I wondered if I should admit her. But when I followed up two days later, she was so much better,” Dr Coetzee says.

Dr Coetzee, who was briefing other African medical associations on Saturday, made clear her patients were all healthy and she was worried the new variant could still hit older people – with co-morbidities such as diabetes or heart disease – much harder.

“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said.

South African demographics are very different from those in the UK. Only about six per cent of the population are over the age of 65. This means that older individuals who are more vulnerable to the virus may take some time to present.

www.msn.com/en-gb/health/medical/south-african-doctor-who-raised-alarm-about-omicron-variant-says-symptoms-are-unusual-but-mild/ar-AARczsR?ocid=msedgntp

Back at the beginning of the year, a customer in my previous job had been in Tanzania for several months, a red list country. If he'd flown directly back to the UK he would have had to isolate in one of the Covid hotels. He admitted to us that he couldn't afford that, so flew via Dublin and could go straight back home where he didn't seem to isolate at all as he tried to come to our office 2/3 days later.

The whole border things seems very difficult to manage/control.