The corona tests before the flight did not bring much

It has shown little benefit - testing for a corona infection before boarding a flight and immediately afterwards. This is the result of a study from Great Britain in the specialist magazine "PLOS Global Public Health".

Air travel plays a major role in the global spread of respiratory diseases, including for the coronavirus. It is now well documented that at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, travelers from Europe entered around 1,300 Sars-Cov-2 lines in the United Kingdom and thus caused the first wave of the pandemic in Great Britain, write Kata Farkas and her colleagues from the Centre for Environmental Biotechnology at Bangor University in Anglesey, UK.

To check whether early action would have changed anything about this situation, they analyzed the effluent from the toilet tanks of incoming long- and short-haul flights at London Heathrow, Bristol airports over a period of three weeks, from 8 to 22 March 2022 and Edinburgh on Sars-Cov-2.

During this time, namely on March 18, 2022, the rules for unvaccinated people to present a negative corona test before and two days after air travel were lifted in Great Britain. In addition, the researchers took 150 waste water samples from the arrival halls of the airport terminals.

The result: The virus was found in 93 percent of the airplane toilet samples. The tests from the London and Bristol arrivals halls were all positive; in Edinburgh it was at least 85 percent – ​​regardless of whether the passengers had previously been tested or not.

The researchers explain that the corona measure did not have the desired effect for air travelers as follows: On the one hand, it could have been because the tests carried out before and after the flight did not show the Covid disease in good time; on the other hand, the travelers might have found ways to circumvent the rules.

In fact, earlier studies by researchers led by Kate Farkas had already shown that almost one in four of 2,000 respondents boarded a plane to Great Britain even though they felt ill. Another limiting factor, however, is that not many infected people may have traveled immediately after the test obligation was lifted.

More important for the scientists, however, is the basic statement of the study: wastewater analyzes can be an important means of monitoring infectious diseases. The researchers assume that up to 14 percent of the registered Covid cases could have been detected by the wastewater tests.

They advocate establishing the tests so that they can be used as an alarm system for new infectious diseases. It is not possible to test every tank from incoming flights. However, examining the toilets of long-haul flights at a single airport would already help estimate which diseases are entering the country, write Farkas and her colleagues.

"Aha! Ten minutes of everyday knowledge" is WELT's knowledge podcast. Every Tuesday and Thursday we answer everyday questions from the field of science. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer, Amazon Music, among others, or directly via RSS feed.