Agents join airlines and tourism roundtable in call to end PCR testing on arrival
IAN STALKER
Travel agents are lending their voices to a call by prominent travel industry medical personnel for the federal government to shift PCR testing taking place in this country’s airports into communities, arguing that airport testing hinders the travel industry’s recovery while doing little to safeguard Canadians from coronavirus.
Recent voices arguing that airport testing is of little use in containing coronavirus while diverting badly needed resources away from areas where they would be more useful include those of Tammy McKnight, Jim Chung and Edward Wasser — the chief medical officers for WestJet, Air Canada and Toronto’s Pearson Airport respectively — who said in a recent open letter to federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos and others that over 123,000 recent PCR tests undertaken at airports in this country saw an average positivity rate of around 3%, well below the positivity rate in communities.
Saskatoon Uniglobe Carefree Travel Group’s Jamie Milton told Travel Courier that the travel industry “has gone out of its way to provide a safe environment” for Canadians and notes those returning to this country by plane must be fully vaccinated and have had a negative PCR test within 72 hours of their return.
Airport testing amounts to “piling on restrictions that are of little to no benefit,” she said, adding “the millions of dollars spent on testing at airports could be spent on additional testing for essential workers to reduce community spread, where the majority of our cases are coming from.”
Milton said Ottawa has been mulling over testing all arriving international air passengers for a couple of months but fewer than half are now being tested.
“Those who are tested face wait times of 2 to 3 times longer than promised,” she continued. “This is causing an unfair burden on travellers who are selected for a test as they miss work, school or important functions, despite being fully vaccinated and having a negative PCR test that is only days old.”
Milton argued that airport testing amounts to discrimination against a hard-hit travel industry, which has taken more steps to protect people from coronavirus than most other industries.
“We will never recover with these restrictions in place and it will soon be too little too late as our industry crumbles,” she warned.
Toronto Uniglobe Enterprise Travel agent Ethel Hansen Davey said she’s baffled that Ottawa favours testing air travellers arriving in this country when “non-travelling Canadians are being denied access to PCR tests. “I wonder about the numbers?” she said. “How many passengers have actually tested positive at our airports?
“I’m all for being proactive in stopping this virus but it seems to me that we are, once again, closing the barn door after the horses have bolted. Is there any data that would indicate that isolating a few travellers could, in any significant way, stop the spread of the Omicron variant? If there is, certainly we haven’t been made aware of it. I think it sounds like the government is, unreasonably, suggesting that those that travel are the root of our problems. I think that travellers that are fully vaccinated should be exempt from the mandatory testing.
“My personal opinion, based on the news we are inundated with, is that stopping unvaccinated people from crossing our international borders is much more effective. I was appalled to find out the very low numbers of truckers who have been crossing our borders without proof of vaccination over these many months. What the heck? We are seriously penalizing everyone else but them? There must be common sense involved in these decisions.”
In their letter, Chung, McKnight and Wasser said Ottawa should end mandatory airport testing and “shift these scarce resources to our schools, communities and healthcare system.”
They said Ottawa should opt for “surveillance arrival testing of international air passengers” and mandatory isolation for those arriving from an international location if they show signs of coronavirus or test positive on a surveillance test.
Removing PCR testing at Pearson Airport alone would free up 8,000 tests a day for the Greater Toronto Area, “which will help keep our most vulnerable — those in long-term care, hospitals and our children attending school — safe,” they added in the letter.
