Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

Wow: "There were two flights from South Africa that landed in Amsterdam late last night. Upon arrival, all 600 passengers were tested on the tarmac and 61 tests came back positive. A 10% prevalence rate on a flight is unbelievably high. [...] Especially given all passengers were negative before take off."

Hopefully there was some contact between them before the flight to help explain that.

View on HN

The comment that passengers were "negative before take-off" is largely false. Only non-vaccinated passengers were required to show a negative PCR test (max 48h old) or RAG test (max 24h old), vaccinated passengers were allowed to board without any restrictions.

Source (in Dutch): https://nos.nl/l/2407382

Note: that source states 13 of those 61 people are confirmed to have the Omikron variant.

And for completeness, the sequencing hasn't finished yet so that number may still rise.

Primary source for all figures mentioned so far: https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/coronavariant-omikron-tot-nu-toe-...

How, is there a new test for Omicron variant? And is it available in the US?

No, it’s confirmed via sequencing. But the Omicron variant has a qPCR dropout like Alpha had, so you can identify likely cases from PCR tests and then use sequencing to verify.

So 50 others were flying presumably infected with standard or unknown variants, but since they are vaccinated it would have gone unchecked?

All passengers on any flight leaving South Africa must show a negative PCR test, including those who have been vaccinated.

Source: https://www.gov.za/covid-19/individuals-and-households/trave...

Ah thanks. That sorts out why the passengers were tested despite dutch regulations.

That’s confusingly worded and not enforced. I can confirm that fully vaccinated people flying from South Africa to the Netherlands did not need negative PCR tests until this week. You’re only required to fill in a declaration of vaccination status on the South African side.

Source: I did the trip in late October, and colleagues just returned in mid-November. None of us had to have negative PCR or any other tests.

On today’s episode of BBC World Service podcast they interviewed a canadian journalist who flew on one of those flights and she said that they as passangers were not asked to get tested before boarding.

She said she only tested herself since her following flight from AMS mandated it.

And receiving a negative test does not rule out being positive. The false negative rates - even for pcr - are high double digits (and depend on the phase of the infection). Lots of good research proving it, and yet not widely publicized.

From the local Dutch rules and news: Not all required testing. Fully vaccinated EU citizens could be on that flight without being tested. They changed the rules to require testing for everyone after these two flights were already in the air.

Out of the 61 positive tests, today 13 were confirmed to be the omicron variant.

And a third of passengers were not wearing masks during the flight despite it being mandatory.

It's just security theater, we pretend to obey the rules, and they pretend to check.

Based on…? I’ve been on 4 Delta flights in the last 3 months and the flight attendants were militant about masks. They told a woman in front of me on one flight that if they had to tell her to keep it above her nose a third time she was going to be banned from future delta flights.

From personal experience, KLM is quite lax about it.

You tried Delta flights but you didn't try Omicron flights :-)

its never too early for humour

Regardless of airlines, masks come off for drinks and snacks. They remain off as long as you look like you're still sipping on that coffee and when you're done, they're usually only loosely enforced back on. It really is a big joke.

My suspicion is falsified test results. Since there is no control over lab results nor any verification, falsifying test results is trivial. ...easier than even getting the test even if you think you are negative.

This is why travel bans need to be much much more rapid in response to outbreaks.

As fast as this virus spreads, I suspect travel bans are useless. By the time you discovery an outbreak, it's already circulating in your population.

Reasoning from purely a physical system perspective, I'm confident that a travel "ban" will slow its spread, especially the earlier you enforce it.

But agreed it will never be 100% effective.

The question remains is the slowing worth the ban? Bans are painful, but any slowing will buy professionals more time to study it and begin targetted mitigations, and while the total infected is smaller than otherwise.

Trade-offs...

Also due to unequal sequencing efforts, countries like South Africa and England get travel bans for being the first to find such a variant.

We're banning the messenger.

> Like defies imagination (as Bergstrom said).

Could there be another source for this?

Hasn’t uniformity in test / detection standards been a source in region to region variability in some instances?

So far 13 have tested positive for Omicron.

The only explanation I can think of is that "especially given all passengers were negative" is false.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com