Passengers limited on ‘high-risk’ flights

China will cap passenger loads to 75% of an aircraft’s seats on flights designated a “high-risk” for Covid-19 in an effort to contain imported cases, says the country’s aviation regulator.

The pandemic situation is still severe and complex globally, officials said.

With an increase of international passenger flights, the number of cases imported through air travel has been on the upswing, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said on Tuesday.

The National Health Commission said on Tuesday that no new locally transmitted cases had been reported across the Chinese mainland since Aug 16, with all new infections coming from abroad.

By the end of Monday, 2,509 imported cases had been reported on the mainland. Of them, 2,327 had been discharged from hospitals after recovering, and 182 remained hospitalised, with three in severe condition, the commission said.

To stem further cross-border transmission of the virus, the administration will scale up management of international passenger flights with an elevated infection risk. The administration said international passenger flights classified as “high-risk” could fill no more than 75% of the seats.

Risk is determined by the administration’s latest technical guidelines for airlines’ epidemic prevention and control.

Those technical guidelines take into consideration factors such as the ratio of existing confirmed cases among every one million population at the flight’s departure country or region, and a flight’s duration.

Restrictions on passenger loads will be further expanded to cover two more types of flights.

The first type is those with a total of five or more passengers having tested positive for the virus on the same route in three consecutive weeks. The second is those restarted after having been suspended by the administration under a flight incentive and suspension policy announced in June.

For those two types of flights, the carriers will be allowed to increase their passenger loads to full capacity when no passengers on the route have positive nucleic acid tests for three consecutive weeks.

China will continue to strictly implement flight incentive and suspension measures based on its epidemic prevention and control work in a bid to prevent further cross-border transmission, the administration added.