Russia has halted all flights into and out of the country

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-russia-flights/russia-to-halt-all-flights-at-midnight-on-friday-including-for-repatriation-idUSKBN21L1ZM

by bookofjoe • 6 years ago

132 58 6 years ago

reuters.com

LatteLazy3• 6 years ago

Lots of countries have.

I was on one of the last flights to transit through Taiwan. Here in the UK, the government have been talking about a program to get brits back from Australia because many of the places you have to stop and refuel are closed even to transiting passengers.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/03/coronavirus-travel-re...

https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/australia/return-to...

gambiting4• 6 years ago

Weirdly enough, I had a quick look at Heathrow arrivals and departures, and there's still loads of flights leaving every 10 minutes, to all kinds of destinations. Multiple flights per day to Rome - I guess if you absolutely, positively have to be in Italy right now! In comparison, my local airport in North of England had a single flight the entire day.

shartshooter• 6 years ago

My understanding is that if airlines stop running flights they may lose their access to a given airport or terminal. So they run flights even if they aren't full or in major demand.

opless• 6 years ago

Right now the only aircraft over London are police helicopters.

https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com

LatteLazy3• 6 years ago

When I came back to Gatwick, they were still listing flights from 12h before (100s of them) as "delayed". I think the system they use is pre populated long in advance...

jakub_g• 6 years ago

Sometimes the flights are allowed to fly one way but not another.

Overall the flights are ~88% down year-to-year in European space.

https://twitter.com/eurocontrolDG/status/1245620098754207744

skeleton schedules, cargo, repatriation & maintenance flights make up most of what's left

dehrmann2• 6 years ago

get brits back from Australia

There is/was a commercial non-stop from Perth to Heathrow, and with how many people they'd be flying, you could also use a half-filled 787.

spindle2• 6 years ago

Right, Qantas was getting people across via Perth (and also, briefly, Darwin) until recently, but now Qantas has stopped flying, and I don't think those routes are available to other airlines.

LatteLazy3• 6 years ago

I think it's an organisational problem rather a technical one to be fair.

You can (could) fly Perth to London. But will Perth put up with extra flights when (say) Singapore won't? And Western Australia has closed it's borders too, so you'll need political approval, can you get that? And are you sure you will have aircrew that will do the trip? And 26h is a long time to be on a flight, what happens if someone starts coughing harder and harder, you can't leave them at the midpoint. And remember, your airline is now on the verge of bankruptcy, so there isn't a budget for any of this and everyone senior is busy...

Interestingly they were talking about doing London-Sydney back in Jan. Popular Mechanics had an article about re-enforcing the Hull so pressure inside could be higher so you would not feel as rough at such a long flight...

heurifk• 6 years ago

I suspect this is to deter Russians from coming home for the Orthodox Easter which is way more important than in the West.

krasin2• 6 years ago

I am a Russian living abroad. I know literally no one coming back to Russia for Easter. It's the first time I even heard of this idea.

Summer or New Year are the times when Russians are more likely to go to visit their relatives and friends.

option• 6 years ago

same here. what a weird idea

gambiting4• 6 years ago

Do you have any idea why that is? Length of travel? Cost of travel? I'm a Pole living abroad and every year I try to go to visit my family for Easter, it seems like a pretty normal thing to do.

tomp• 6 years ago

The only reason I got home to Slovenia for Easter is, it's a 4-day-weekend in the UK.

anticodon2• 6 years ago

This comment shows how little westerners know about Russia and Russians. Easter is of very little importance in Russia, especially for Russians living abroad.

For religious Russians abroad there are Orthodox churches in almost every country, even in Thailand and Cambodia.

freefal• 6 years ago

I thought this happened a week ago when they suspended the Candidates chess tournament.

starik36• 6 years ago

It was announced during the tournament with a grace period, which has now expired. I feel bad for Rajubov who actually predicted this happening and they kicked him out of the tournament.

lolc4• 6 years ago

Is it reasonable to assume, at this point, that international travel is still a relevant contributor to the spread of the virus? Apart from reducing travel overall, I don't see how the ban could have an impact once the virus is distributed. Especially since domestic flights seem to continue.

Initially, yes. It could have changed things. But this action now feels way too late. Like two months late. It feels like a nationalistic rally of blaming others for the spread.

Retric• 6 years ago

I suspect it’s the airports and aircraft themselves rather than the destination that’s at issue. Small isolated groups may become infected, but they are far less likely to infect others outside the group. Airports inherently mix people from large areas within a country together which crosses those boundaries.

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

How can you possibly fly while social-distancing? Even in first class.

spindle2• 6 years ago

I believe there are at least three issues:

1. My guess is that you're right, the main reason this is happening is a nationalistic wish to blame others for the spread.

But also:

2. As other commentators have noticed, it's difficult to socially distance in an airport. On the plane itself, there is extremely good ventilation and what limited evidence I've seen suggests that transmission is low, but in airports that might not be the case (I'm not sure).

3. Air crew may refuse to fly. Of course there are many other service professions in which enormous numbers of staff are being asked to expose themselves to a high risk of infection ... but almost all of those staff are (sadly) easy to replace if they refuse, whereas pilots are not.

creato• 6 years ago

1. My guess is that you're right, the main reason this is happening is a nationalistic wish to blame others for the spread.

More than half of the world's population is under lockdown within their countries, and you still think that shutting down air travel is a nationalistic wish?

lolc4• 6 years ago

On the plane itself, there is extremely good ventilation and what limited evidence I've seen suggests that transmission is low, but in airports that might not be the case (I'm not sure).

I doubt that airplanes are in any way safer than airports. In an airplane it's hard not to touch places other people's droplets have reached.

jariel• 6 years ago

Hugely. Taiwan is an 'isolated island' with no outbreak i.e. no community spread. They have the 300 cases there nailed down. So anyone coming in the country is a source of contamination.

Otherwise - this is still a problem.

In my little regional city in Canada - cases are small and they've already peaked. Case load is small enough that we are now a 'landlocked' island. Within days we could feasibly 'go back to work' were we to be sure nobody is 'entering the bubble'. That won't be the case, but you see what I mean.

I think borders are a pretty big deal in terms of being able to contain this problem.

I suggest that in order to travel internationally in the next little while, it might be required to have a 'test card' indicating you're clean from COVID within the last x number of days for example.

Either that or everyone coming into a country has to isolate for x days.

Jedd2• 6 years ago

Yes, it's reasonable to assume it's a contributor to the spread -- but I'm not sure what you mean by 'relevant'. Significant? (un)controllable? Worth bothering with?

I can't find the article now, but a week or two ago Singapore and South Korea (IIRC) were claiming most of their new cases were imports, as they'd been approaching some level of control (via tracking & testing) within their borders.

Because different countries have wildly different attitudes, policies, and procedures - the best place to enforce domestic controls are at your own border.

As you say, domestic travel can and will also spread the virus, but that doesn't mean you throw arms in the air and accept all travellers from everywhere.

lolc4• 6 years ago

I meant significant. I don't think Russia is at a point that compares well with South Korea. For SK I can understand when they differentiate between domestic and international fights.

refurb• 6 years ago

Take a look at Vietnam and Singapore. Both clamped down hard back in January. They were keeping their numbers quite low (<100), especially impressive considering Vietnam is 100M people.

Once the virus spread to other countries and they started to shutdown, a lot of Singapore and Vietnamese nationals returned home. Contact tracing indicated that almost 100% of new cases were people returning from overseas.

Last I checked Singapore has close to 1,000 cases and Vietnam almost 300.

To answer your question, yes, stopping international travel can have a big impact on controlling the disease.

colmvp• 6 years ago

As a Canadian, I find it frustrating that for weeks, the Federal government was hesitant to halt air travel, citing the WHO who stated that closing borders showed little evidence on slowing the transmission of influenza (https://postmediaedmontonjournal2.files.wordpress.com/2020/0...)

And in the end, we ended up closing our borders except well beyond the time when it could've made a major difference.

rfoo• 6 years ago

It may help, but Italy (also shutdown flights to/from China in January) shows that the impact is not big enough.

klenwell• 6 years ago

That would be my assumption as well. I would hypothesize that once the virus is well seeded within a country, the contribution by new travelers is dwarfed by internal propagation.

Using the famous Washington Post simulation as a reference:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-si...

I imagine it's like the second scenario in reverse. Rather than the wall opening, picture it closing after the virus is already spreading uncontained on either side.

Of course, it could be a significant factor in keeping the outbreak initially contained. But that involves an even more fanciful assumption in my view: that you could impose and really tightly enforce a ban early enough to matter. The continued pressure from Trump and many of his political allies to "open the economy" -- and their resistance to "shutting it down" in the first place -- shows such a proposition, offered at a point it would have mattered (if that were even possible with the initial stonewalling by China on the severity of the outbreak) would almost certainly have been cried down as paranoia and overreaction by the kind of business and political interests who hold real influence over these matters.

8bitsrule• 6 years ago

Based on what I've read about how and where the outbreaks started, I'm pretty sure that when this is over and the analysis comes in, air-travel will get the blame for the early and rapid spread of this virus. It looks clear that Taiwan's robust success is the result of immediate quarantine of travelers.

Two people recently flew into a Gwitchin community in the Yukon expecting to live off the land. They were quickly (and angrily) isolated and flown back to Whitehorse by the RCMP.

mirimir• 6 years ago

Huh. I live in a rural area. Tourism (hunting, fishing, etc) is the main driver for visitors. Now many locals do not want visitors, notwithstanding the money that they spend.

arkanciscan• 6 years ago

Putin should have kept that plane of supplies he sent to the US to prove a point.

ineedasername2• 6 years ago

I'm not aware of information coming out of Russia that contradicts their official reporting, but I still find it extremely implausible that they have been so little impacts by the virus spread. But I'm flying blind on this speculation, I freely admit: Are typical travel patterns between Russia and the rest of Europe so minimal as to explain their decrease exposure?

kds3• 6 years ago

Maybe because they started testing early? Their first cases were in January and they screened everyone in airports since then [0], they performed 639606 tests with 4731 positives. [1][2]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-health-pneumonia-russi...

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing

amai• 6 years ago

Let's read some real news:

- https://meduza.io/en/news/2020/04/02/russian-public-health-a...

- https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/03/18/at-the-peak-we-could...

- https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/04/03/russian-doctors-unio...

woodandsteel• 6 years ago

Wikipedia has an article on the coronavirus epidemic in Russia, including the government's response. Of course, the data may not be reliable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_R...

batter• 6 years ago

This doesn't align with their propaganda that claims coronavirus has no more harm than regular flu. People are told there is no coronavirus in Russia, just couple minor cases.

anticodon2• 6 years ago

This is absolutely false. Just one more fake news about Russia.

wdr1• 6 years ago

The WHO generally considers against such travel restrictions.

https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...

asexdrtfgyu• 6 years ago

WHO's bad advice is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. I watched their conferences in January. Simultaneously heaping praise on China for their effective quarantines while demanding other countries not cut off flights from China because there was little risk. If every country ignored them and stopped travel, or said every person entering the country has to spend X days in quarantine, this could have been contained. And that's only one part of WHO's failure.

lobotryas• 6 years ago

The WHO is in China's pocket and is doing the bidding of CCP. Their advice is not to be trusted.

Russia has halted all flights into and out of the country

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