Coronavirus: Virgin Australia flight attendant tests positive

Virgin Australia passengers are being urgently contacted after the positive test result.

A Virgin flight attendant has tested positive to coronavirus.

Passengers of a number of Virgin Australia flights are being contacted after a flight attendant tested positive to coronavirus.

The woman is in isolation and Virgin would not reveal if she worked on domestic or international flights for privacy reasons.

A spokeswoman said the flight attendant was receiving medical care and the chances of infection for passengers was considered very low.

“The Health Department is contacting any passengers who were in contact with the flight attendant,” said the spokeswoman.

“Virgin Australia is contacting other cabin crew members who may have worked with this person.”

She said World Health Organisation advice rated the risk of cabin crew to passenger infection as low due to the brevity of face-to-face interactions.

All aircraft were being thoroughly cleaned after every flight, with hospital grade disinfectant. Crew have been given the option of wearing personal protective equipment like masks and gloves but this is not mandatory.

The positive test is the latest blow for Virgin Australia which announced a range of further capacity cuts on Friday, across its domestic and international network.

Although the airline will go ahead with new flights from Brisbane to Tokyo from March 29, they will be reduced to three times a week, instead of daily.

Sydney to Los Angeles will also be cut to five times a week from May, and further reductions will be made on trans-Tasman routes.

Domestic capacity will be trimmed by five per cent, increasing to 6.2 per cent in the first quarter of the 2021 financial year.

International capacity cuts will climb to 10.2 per cent of Virgin’s network by July.

Virgin Australia CEO Paul Scurrah said the global industry had seen a significant decline in demand and the group continued to assess its response.

“We have already announced a number of measures to mitigate the impact from COVID-19 however the pace of the global spread and decline in demand has required us to implement further changes today to minimise the future financial impact,” Mr Scurrah said.

“As a largely domestic airline, we are less exposed to the impact on international travel however we remain disciplined in our focus on managing capacity in response to forward bookings and continuing to reduce costs across the business.

“It’s worth noting that domestic operations account for 88 per cent of our passengers and 78 per cent of our flight revenue.”

He said there were some routes that were seeing good demand, including to Western Australia, Hamilton Island and the Gold and Sunshine Coasts.

“This demonstrates Australians are continuing to travel within our own backyard and support local tourism,” said Mr Scurrah.

In a matter of weeks, the coronavirus outbreak has devastated demand for travel like nothing before — not the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2007-09 global financial crisis, and certainly not the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic to which COVID-19 was originally compared.

Qantas Airways chief executive Alan Joyce will take no salary for the remainder of the financial year, and also scrapped management bonuses, while outlining plans to cut capacity on its main airline and low-cost subsidiary ­Jetstar by as much as 23 per cent up to mid-September. Other airlines have been forced to fly empty in order to maintain prized airport slots, a situation that regulators are now under pressure to resolve.

And just when it seemed like it could not get any worse, US President Donald Trump announced a 30-day ban on all travel between Europe and the US — a move Prime Minister Scott Morrison may yet adopt for Australia, where travel bans have already been slapped on China and Italy, among other nations.