Last Wednesday, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) issued new guidelines that make it clear the severe restrictions being put on air travel are not effective at stopping the spread of COVID.
The guidelines state, “Travelers should not be considered as a high-risk population, nor treated as contacts of COVID-19 cases unless they had been in known contact with a confirmed positive case.”
Throughout the European Union, as is true among individual states in the U.S., there is no consistency among the restrictions imposed by political leaders when it comes to both testing and forced quarantines. And, overall, the restrictions show no strong results.
The ECDC worked closely with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) on the new guidelines. As reported by Politico.eu, the two agencies’ combined data confirmed that “strict testing and quarantines are only useful if a country has reduced transmission levels to almost zero.”
Adina Valean, the European Commissioner for Transport, told a sustainable summit meeting organized by Politico on 2 December, “The traveler, is not an infected person… We have absolutely no scientific proof that traveling as such was bringing an increase of the [infection] numbers.”
The aviation industry quickly responded to the European agencies’ new guidelines by requesting governments to end their quarantine and testing restrictions. As reported by airportsecurity.com on 3 December, Olivier Jankovec, the head of ACI Europe, a trade organization responsible for improving airport management, stated,
“These guidelines unequivocally show quarantines to be essentially politically driven, non-risk-based measures, which bear no relation to what is actually needed to safeguard public health. As such, quarantines fail the test of proportionality, a key principle of EU law, particularly since there are no equivalent measures at land borders.
This has resulted in unprecedented limitations to the freedom of movement and the freedom to provide services. We call on national governments to immediately abolish their quarantine restrictions and restore freedom of movement for European citizens.”
