This was published 4 years ago
Travel and coronavirus: Travellers set to face health checks along with security screening
By Anthony Dennis
Airlines passengers are likely to face health checks in addition to the usual security measures at airports in the future. Credit: Getty Images
When two jets, packed with passengers and aviation fuel, careered into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York nearly two decades ago, the nature of travel was immediately and irrevocably altered.
To this day, most of the security measures introduced after September 11, 2001, remain largely intact, albeit with refinements.
Now another existential threat to the global order, an invisible terror, has emerged to rattle the world's travel industry and travellers alike, to its core. Changes to the way we travel internationally, when borders are eventually reopened, are destined to be even more extensive, challenging and disruptive as the measures provoked by the September 11 terror attacks.
Emirates is already testing passengers for coronavirus before allowing them to fly.
For the already devastated travel industry, which in 2018 was worth nearly $US9 trillion ($A14.1 trillion) to the global economy and employed almost 320 million, with nearly a million in Australia alone, COVID-19 is the nearest equivalent of September 11, except infinitely worse.
Where September 11 was all about terror, COVID-19 is all about the insidious dread wrought by a new and highly-contagious disease that in some way touches virtually all of humanity.
Health, and health checks, will dominate all facets of the future international travel experience, adding yet more layers of stress, inconvenience and frustration in an eerily similar fashion to which we've been accustomed with security checks. But exactly how that process is managed and the timing of it remains uncertain.
"[The resumption of travel] will be one of the most difficult elements of the pandemic to manage safely, until the virus is contained internationally, any international traveller could conceivably, inadvertently spread the virus," said Adam Kamradt-Scott, a University of Sydney associate professor specialising in global health security and international relations.
Kamradt-Scott added that if the coronavirus was ultimately contained across every jurisdiction in Australia, it was likely that Australians would have to holiday at home and avoid international travel, possibly for the next year.
When the moment does emerge for us to travel overseas again, as it must to revive the global economy, how will we possibly travel in a world which may not vanquish the virus with a vaccine?
The obstacles are manifold and disquieting. If some way is found for travel to resume, sans a COVID-19 vaccine, expect a wholly different world where influenza vaccinations are essential, lest any flu-like respiratory symptoms you acquire are confused with the coronavirus, temperature testing is a regular occurrence and more official vigilance of travellers' history of vaccinations for other diseases a feature of most, if not all, holidays.
In a real-time glimpse of the future germ-fearing world of travel, one airline is already devising ways to continue flying and making money and it doesn't just involve less post-flight crowding around the baggage carousel.
Earlier this week the giant Dubai-based carrier, Emirates, with the Dubai Health Authority and in a world aviation first, introduced speedy, finger-prick based COVID-19 testing of all passengers. Emirates passengers are also required to wear their own masks when at the airport and onboard the aircraft and follow social distancing guidelines.
Whether the initiative proves feasible, practically or economically across multiple flights, it offers an insight into how we may be forced to travel in the uncertain future in which the absence of domestic and inbound tourism in Australia wiping out an estimated $9 million a month.
Asked last week whether the international bans would stay for this calendar year or beyond, Simon Birmingham, the Federal Minister for Tourism, reflected the sense of uncertainty and circumspection within the medical profession towards travel. "It's very difficult to predict and nobody should be getting ahead of themselves at the present," Senator Birmingham stated.
Senator Birmingham, in a radio interview this week, placed ocean cruising, one of the most high-profile casualties of the pandemic, at the bottom on his list of tourism industry segments to fully return with the death toll from the Ruby Princess now effectively ranking as one of the worst peacetime luxury cruise liner disasters.
In an indication of the task ahead for rebuilding confidence in cruising among consumers and governments alike, the Malaysia-based Genting Cruise Lines recently announced a bewildering raft of future coronavirus preventative measures. They include mandatory temperature screening and pre-boarding health declarations for all passengers, infrared fever screening systems at ship gangways and increased levels of sanitisation and disinfection in cabins with hospital grade disinfectant.
"With the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak regionally and globally many guests as well as crew have developed higher awareness and expectations with regards to the safety and preventive measures of cruise ships," Kent Zhu, the president of Genting Cruise Lines said.
"As a responsible cruise company, it is our duty to adopt a proactive approach to meet and also strive to exceed the growing expectations and concerns of the public."
In the meantime, air travel is set to be the tourism segment that will be the most difficult to manage. If social distancing principles still need to be adhered to, airports and airlines may face a threat to their basic financial models which may have to be addressed by higher fares.
Already Australian airlines have been criticised for failing to space apart passengers on their rare flights while US airlines are already blocking out the notorious middle seat on airlines. Conventional wisdom in the aviation industry dictates that airlines make their profits from business class with economy class helping to pay the bills. But paying the bills has meant squeezing as many passengers into ever-shrinking seats as possible.
"Whether the pandemic will prompt a re-think about how many people we cram onto airplanes remains to be seen," said Kamradt-Scott. "In the interim, to maintain social distancing on aircraft, it is likely that you would have to significantly reduce the number of passengers per plane, ensuring everyone is appropriately spaced with frequent cleaning of common areas such as toilets. The question then becomes whether it is economical for the airlines to fly half-filled aircraft."
Peter Harbison, a Sydney-based aviation consultant and chairman of the Centre for Aviation, envisages challenges for the healthy and safe boarding of passengers through arrival and departure lounges and via narrow, enclosed aerobridges with the potential for airports to have to surrender once valuable retail space to reduce crowding.
"Even if a vaccine is found there will still be the spectre of another pandemic or outbreak for travellers," he said. "It will definitely feel like security has done post-September 11."
One area of the travel industry that may eventually emerge in better health from the coronavirus crisis are hotels with Kamradt-Scott predicting that as long as future guests continued to exercise normal infection control and personal hygiene practices, the risk of onward transmission remained low.
"We do know the virus can survive on some surfaces for up to 72 hours such as stainless steel, which presents a challenge for areas like elevators, so while there is an immediate need for frequent disinfection of common surfaces such as elevator buttons, there are technological alternatives that can be considered in the future to reduce the demand for touching surfaces."
Dr Deb Mills, a clinical director of the Travel Medicine Alliance network of travel medicine doctors around Australia, is pessimistic about the ability for overseas holidays fully resuming unless a vaccine to defeat COVID-19 is achieved. It will be a difficult task for medical science since it has never successfully created one for a coronavirus, she said.
"If it's a virus that's still rampaging around the world then we won't be travelling anywhere. As Andrew Cuomo [the Governor of New York State] said recently, there won't be any dancing in the street moments in the battle against the coronavirus. It'll be a gradual, bit by bit, step by step process."
Anthony Dennis is travel editor of The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age
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