Professor Anthony Staines:

I understand the point the Deputy makes and I thank him for the question. The problem with modern airline traffic is that one might have people on an aeroplane who are coming from 40 different places. They may all have got on an aeroplane in Birmingham but they could have come to Birmingham from literally the four corners of the world. There is a real challenge with bringing airline traffic up to its previous levels. Airline freight is a different story. Air crews are a manageable number but I do not see that there will be a return to the scale of passenger air traffic that we have been accustomed to for some time to come. Mr. O'Brien might have a better idea about that than I would.

It is possible to do random testing. The problem with it is that the test itself is about 70% reliable. Once one tests a sample of passengers on an aeroplane, for example, with an unreliable test, the reliability goes down another few notches in terms of answering the question of whether there is someone on the aeroplane who can transmit Covid. There is enormous work being done on Covid testing, which I only dimly understand, so I would expect that the quality of testing will go up and the price and speed of testing will go down. At the moment, with the tests we are currently using, I think most of us in public health would advocate testing everyone on the aeroplane. I appreciate the challenges that throws up for the industry.