Emergency operation and location underway after infection of the rest of the couple’s family
An urgent tracking and location operation is underway in Berlin after a couple tested positive for coronavirus after returning from the holiday to their friends in Manchester.
Fifty other people who have had contact with the couple since their return are quarantined, thirteen of whom have tested positive for Covid-19.
The Turkish couple, a 50-year-old taxi driving force and his 45-year-old wife, returned home on a Ryanair flight on July 16. They were not diagnosed until six days after his return. The total circle of relatives is now infected, adding the couple’s 4 children, the elderly from nine to 21 and their grandmother.
Gudrun Widders, an official at the local fitness centre in Berlin’s Spandau district, told Bild newspaper that no one in the family circle needed hospital treatment.
She told the Guardian on Tuesday that the fitness office had made several attempts to touch Ryanair so that the airline could touch other passengers on board the plane, but “had not returned.”
Ryanair insisted that it had the information relevant to the German authorities.
A spokesman for the Irish airline said: “Ryanair handles government requests for public fitness related to passenger contact lists in the face of suspicious or shown cases of Covid-19. We won a request from the Department of Health of the Berlin-Spandau District Office on July 22 and Ryanair responded the same day with the appropriate documentation to publish the flight manifest in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). The German fitness government did not meet until five days later and we provided the main points of the questioned passenger.
However, a passenger who on the same flight contacted the Guardian to express his fear that the airline had not contacted him.
“I haven’t had any communication from Ryanair about a Covid-19 infection on board,” Anthony Harrison said.
Contact studies are a component of the airline’s global industry recovery plan, and in theory reduce the threat that an infection on board an aircraft could lead to a major epidemic.
The incident comes at a delicate time for Ryanair and the industry as they try to return to pre-pandemic levels. The dramatic drop in passenger numbers since the arrival of restrictions in March has put the sector under serious monetary pressure, with Ryanair, easyJet, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic among airlines adding tens of thousands of jobs.
The International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations firm regulating air travel, recommends that airlines require passengers to fill out a “passenger fitness location form” to allow the public fitness government to seek contacts.
The Robert Koch Institute, the German government’s leading public fitness advisory body, said Tuesday that air transport itself was probably not to inspire the spread of the disease, although others were unable to comply with recommended distance rules. “Modern aircraft have air conditioning filtration systems, which makes them safer than other travel bureaucracies,” RKI President Lothar Wieler said. “An airplane is usually a position where the threat of infection is not as high.”
RKI epidemiologist Ute Rexroth said the institute had vigorously sought to track down and track down air travelers suspected of having been in danger of contracting the disease early in the pandemic, but that the procedure had proved “incredibly complicated,” he added. knowledge of the airlines themselves. It’s just a huge effort.”
In some other event, the German Foreign Ministry on Tuesday begged tourists who do not visit several Spanish regions, adding Catalonia, where coronavirus infection rates have increased. “Lately we warn unnecessary tourist eduches in the autonomous communities of Aragon, Catalonia and Navarra for the greatest number of local contagions and closures,” the ministry said on its website.
Starting Wednesday, Berlin airports will offer loose testing to others arriving in the city. On Monday, the state of Bavaria led the large deployment of coronavirus testing services in the hope of achieving as many returning tourists as possible. There is a political consensus in Germany that mandatory testing makes sense in a context of increasing the number of virus cases at home and abroad.
In the last 8 days, the German capital has reported 234 new coronaviruses.