Almost one third of air travellers skip isolation hotel
Almost one third of all air travellers arriving in Canada have been allowed to skip the mandatory stay in a government-approved quarantine hotel, a rate of exemption from the controversial COVID-19 control measure that could undermine its public health goals.
About 88,000 arriving international air travellers were deemed exempt from the expensive hotel stay requirement, according to the most recent data from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). The agency would not provide a breakdown of the reasons for these exemptions.
The PHAC data shows at least 30 per cent of international air travellers, unlike others, didn’t have to show proof of a pre-booked and fully paid stay at one of the approved hotels near the airports in the four cities in Canada allowed to accept international flights: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.
In addition, many travellers have outright refused to go to a mandatory hotel — at least 609 of them have been issued tickets for the infraction, facing a $3,000 fine for each day of non-compliance, according to the latest data — and an unknown number are circumventing the rule by flying into the United States and crossing into Canada by land, after which a quarantine hotel stay is not required.
An infection prevention specialist questioned the effectiveness of a public health measure that ignores a third of the people it is designed to control.
Dr. Gerald Evans, chairman of the infectious diseases division at Queen’s University and medical director of infection prevention and control at Kingston Health Sciences Centre, said the quarantine hotel exemption rate is “quite high.”
“It would (undermine the policy) as this means about one third of travellers may not be quarantined effectively,” Evans said.
“At the moment, emerging SARS-COV-2 variants are likely to enter Canada via international travel.”
SARS-COV-2 is the formal name of the virus that causes deadly COVID-19 disease.
PHAC said the COVID-19 positivity rate of air travellers arriving in Canada is 1.9 per cent, or almost two in every 100 travellers.
Evans said exempt travellers — which can include those excused for compassionate reasons, flight crews, essential service workers, people who regularly cross the border for work, people undergoing certain medical care, and government officials — could actually have a higher COVID-19 positivity rate than others. Being fully vaccinated does not qualify for an exemption.
These travellers can be expected to have “at least the same, and perhaps higher” positivity, he said, if they are frequent travellers or coming from countries with high circulating numbers of emerging variants.
By contrast, the positivity rate for those tested when crossing the land border from the United States was 0.3 per cent, according to PHAC data.
The new data help capture the efforts and outcomes of the federal government’s regulations aimed at curbing COVID-19 at the border. Under the federal quarantine hotel rules, unless exempted, all travellers arriving in Canada by air must have a fully prepaid and non-refundable threenight reservation at an approved hotel, regardless of citizenship. The rules are an attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19.
The quarantine hotel requirements went into effect on Feb. 21.
From Feb. 22, 2021 to May 4, the overall COVID-19 test positivity rate for all people tested at a Canadian border point was 1.5 per cent, according to PHAC.
Of those tests, 120,453 were done at land border crossings where 392 travellers tested positive for COVID-19, for a positivity rate of 0.3 per cent.
And 285,456 of the tests were done at airports, where 5,465 travellers tested positive, for a positivity rate of 1.9 per cent.
That data shows the danger that still exists from international flights, said Dr. Jeff Kwong, the interim director of the Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases,
and a professor of family medicine and public health, at the University of Toronto.
“One to two per cent positivity doesn’t sound very high, but on a flight of 100 people that’s going to be one or two people on each flight,” Kwong said.
“There’s the question of how much transmission happens in that — at airports, what’s your chance of catching it, and then on the flight, what’s your chance of catching it. How many people who are on that flight get infected by going to the airport, waiting in line and all that sort of thing, and then being on a plane?
“It is not just the infected traveller, it’s all of the other travellers who may have been infected by the infected travellers and then going back into the community.”
Postmedia has tracked 290 international flights that arrived in Canada in April with at least one passenger on board who tested positive for COVID-19.
For PHAC, however, there is plenty of good news in their data.
“The majority of these travellers were staying at a government-authorized accommodation hotel when they tested positive and were then redirected to a designated quarantine facility or another suitable location to limit their interaction with other Canadians,” said Tammy Jarbeau, a spokeswoman for PHAC.
“Each positive case identified from international travel reduces the risk of onward community transmission in Canada.”
The data is dated May 7 and provided at the request of National Post.
Followup questions regarding the impact of the exemption rate and why PHAC would not reveal a breakdown of the categories of the exemptions went unanswered prior to deadline.
The rate of exemptions has increased in recent months.
At the end of February, about 26,000 travellers entering Canada by air were exempt from the mandatory hotel stay, representing 23 per cent of all air travellers in that period, according to the data provided to the Post in March.
IT IS NOT JUST THE INFECTED TRAVELLER, IT’S ALL OF THE TRAVELLERS.