Coronavirus: Flight crews to face compulsory testing

All flight crews entering Australia will be subject to mandatory COVID-19 tests and quarantine from next week.

All flight crews entering Australia will be subject to mandatory COVID-19 tests and quarantine from next week. Picture: James Gourley

All flight crews entering Australia will be subject to mandatory COVID-19 tests and quarantine from next week, after Scott Morrison forced the hand of the NSW government by convening a special session of the national cabinet to bolster defences against the highly infectious UK virus strain.

International travellers will also have to undergo pre-flight tests in new measures, proposed by Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly, to be brought in before the emergency meeting on Friday.

The national cabinet is also ­expected to make masks compulsory on all domestic flights.

The super strain, which some studies suggest is up to 70 per cent more infectious, has been detected in at least 10 Australians arriving from Britain in recent weeks, with health authorities expecting many more as the variant spreads rapidly throughout the UK.

On Wednesday, the British government announced more than 1000 COVID-19 deaths in a ­single day, the highest daily total since April, as the country undergoes a near-complete lockdown.

The push for tighter controls across Australia gathered momentum on Thursday when it was revealed an elderly patient at the centre of multiple PPE protocol breaches in Western Australia had tested positive for the UK strain. Three people — an airport worker, an ambulance officer and a nurse — all failed to wear appropriate personal protective equipment in their contacts with the woman after she arrived from London on January 2.

They are now themselves in mandatory quarantine.

The West Australian government has denied the coronavirus could spread into the community, but Premier Mark McGowan admitted the incident had left him “exasperated and flabbergasted”.

Fears of a renewed outbreak also hit Queensland, where a cleaner at a quarantine hotel in Brisbane tested positive to the new UK strain of the virus — the first locally contracted case in the state in 113 days. Health authorities were racing to trace contacts of the woman, who had worked a shift at the Hotel Grand Chancellor in inner Brisbane.

NSW recorded six new cases of coronavirus on Thursday, all acquired overseas and now in hotel quarantine, with one new case of local transmission recorded after the 8pm cut-off on Wednesday. That case was linked to the Avalon cluster on the northern beaches, which was also sourced to an overseas arrival.

The Berejiklian government had resisted calls by epidemiologists and other state governments to implement mandatory tests for international flight crews and incoming passengers, but on Thursday NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said “in general we support all of these measures”.

“Progressively, we have been looking at any areas we need to strengthen, and this is particularly important in light of the emerging variants from overseas,” she said. “We will be testing all returning flight crews.”

Dr Chant said the national cabinet meeting would look at how the commonwealth and airlines would implement pre-flight screening before boarding, but there might be exceptions.

“We acknowledge that it will be impossible in some circumstances where genuinely people can’t have access to that, and we need to balance those extreme circumstances,” she said.

In a further bid to stem COVID-19 outbreaks, all patient transport staff working in the hotel quarantine system in NSW will undergo daily saliva tests.