For the hundreds of passengers traveling from South Africa to Amsterdam on Friday, flight KL592 had all the filters for international travel in the COVID era.
They arrived with all the documents that proved they were fit to travel and the documentation agents reviewed an overwhelming series of requirements established according to their final destination. Some countries, like the United States, required vaccinated travelers to show that their tests had come back negative. Others do not. Passengers said that only a few people wore face masks during that long flight, as flight attendants often did not attract the attention of those who lowered their masks.
But while the flight was on its way and passengers slept or looked at their screens, everything was changing on the ground.
Panic over the new omicron variant that had been discovered in southern Africa was causing countries to close their borders. Arrivals were landing in a new posomicron reality, and it was a hellish reality, involving hours of breathing stale air while planes stayed on the runway, dealing with exhaustion in crowded waiting rooms, and waiting for swab results very close to other travelers who would turn out to be infected with the new variant that is perhaps more dangerous.
“We were in the same place, in the same room,” said Jan Mezek, a 39-year-old lab technician from a company that maintains swab testing machines and who was returning home to Prague from a trip. two weeks of work. "I felt like a pig in a pen," he commented, adding "they were spreading all the virus around us."
According to the Dutch authorities, of the more than 60 people on that flight and another from KLM from South Africa who tested positive for the virus, at least 14 were infected with omicron. The Dutch authorities have quarantined them - in addition to arresting a couple who had tried to escape and fly to Spain - and asked the hundreds of people who tested negative for PCR tests administered at the airport to go home or to They will board the connecting flights to their final destination.
"They were going to all parts of the world, who knows where," said Fabrizio Pregliasco, a leading Italian virologist at the University of Milan, noting that they must have quarantined or isolated and closely watched all passengers for seven or ten days, mainly because they could have contracted the virus on the flight and tested negative while it was incubating.
"If the variant turns out to be highly contagious, this flight is a time bomb," Pregliasco explained.
These flights, like the early pandemic cruises, have raised fears of over-propagation events and raised concerns that the lesson has not been learned. But they are also representative - because of the varying tests and quarantine criteria, the contradictory use of the mask, and the confusion about contact tracing - of the global response to dissemination and, often, lax enforcement of the law that can worsen a perhaps more contagious phase of the pandemic.
Although the World Health Organization described the omicron variant as “very high risk”, not much is known about it yet. It may take us weeks to find out whether this is an exaggerated fear or a highly contagious new mutation with the ability to evade vaccines and send the world back to lockdowns, crowded hospitals, and unassisted funerals.
The safety offered by vaccines and air-filtering systems on planes caused the United States to open up to travelers from the European Union and other nationalities earlier this month, leading to hugs, tears, and the carefree meetings that were long denied them. But European countries had different rules than the United States — and generally each other — about the testing criteria and self-isolation required for vaccinated people to board a flight. The result was a hodgepodge of regulations, almost always changing, in each country.
Generally, the country of the final destination of the person who travels is the one that determines the rules for the passengers of any flight, explained Karen Grépin, a professor at the School of Public Health of the University of Hong Kong, who has been studying the rules related to travel during the pandemic.
