Mr. Willie Walsh:

Exactly, and this is where the data are important. It depends on how people want to present the data. We can present the data as showing 3% who were infected as opposed to 97% who were not infected, but the evidence is that the vast majority of people were not and the infection rates were very low. When there is widespread infection in a country, the WHO recommendation is that we should not stop international travel, and that once the virus is in place, banning international travel has little or no impact.

One can argue about the variants of concern, and that is another issue. Again, there is the technology with regard to the vaccines, and the evidence that is available today shows that most of the vaccines are effective against the variants. We all know that viruses mutate and that is how viruses stay alive.

The other thing we have to remember is that the deaths which have taken place are tragic and it is a terrible tragedy for all of the families who have suffered as a result of this, but it is not just that people die from coronavirus. This is something we live with. People die from flu but we do not stop the economy every winter because of the outbreak of the flu pandemic and because hundreds of thousands of people die across the world.