Alleged ‘covidiots’ have forced all passengers on a Greece-UK flight into quarantine
A new zero-tolerance face covering policy is set to be put in place on all WestJet flights, starting next week, which could see non-compliant passengers banned from the airline for one year.
Nearly 200 passengers on the flight who took a TUI Airways passenger jet from Greece to the United Kingdom on the 15th of August have been advised to self-isolate, following 16 people from the flight testing positive for the coronavirus.
At least seven of the passengers from three different travelling groups were infectious or potentially infectious on the flight, which flew from Cardiff in Wales, to Zante on the Greek island of Zakynthos last week, and now 193 passengers and crew have reportedly been asked to quarantine for fourteen days.
The Prime Minister has abandoned advice that pupils should not be wearing face coverings in secondary schools in England. Boris Johnson has performed his latest U-turn in the face of growing pressure from teaching unions, headteachers and medical experts.
“Cardiff and Vale Test Trace Protect and Public Health Wales have identified at least seven confirmed cases of COVID-19 from three different parties who were infectious on TUI Flight 6215 from Zante to Cardiff on 25 August,” the incident director for the novel coronavirus outbreak response at Public Health Wales, Giri Shankar, said in a statement.
“As a result, we are advising that all passengers on this flight are considered close contacts and must self-isolate.”
Shankar added that the investigations found out that the coronavirus had spread into other groups of people due to “a lack of social distancing, in particular by a minority of the 20-30 year age group.”
Multiple accounts from those who were on-board the flight blame so-called “covidiots”, or people who disregard and ignore the rules of social distancing and mask-wearing, for the heightened coronavirus infections.
One passenger who was on the plane, Stephanie Whitfield, told BBC Radio 4’s Today show on Monday that many of the those who were on the flight were not wearing their face masks properly, with some behaving as if there was not international pandemic occurring at all.
“Lots of the people were wearing the masks underneath their noses or even underneath their chins,” she said. “They were taking the masks off to talk to friends and they were going up and down the aisles to talk to their friends without their masks on.”
“There was a (man who) sat next to me who had his mask around his chin for the full flight, and the (flight attendant) was talking to him and she didn’t say anything to him,” she said. “The flight was full of selfish ‘covidiots’ and an inept crew who couldn’t care less.”
This comes after thirteen to fourteen-year-olds were less anxious during the nation-wide COVID-19 lockdown than they had been in October of last year, according to a survey from the University of Bristol.
Lee Evans, another passenger on the plane, told BBC News that the aeroplane staff were touching and handling passengers’ phones in order to check boarding passes, among other unsafe practices.
“It was a free-for-all to get on the plane,” said Evans. “There were people switching seats.”
