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Air travel has not been the “ogre” responsible for the spread of the coronavirus as described by lawmakers, the CEO of Aer Lingus said.
Donal Moriarty, Acting CEO of Aer Lingus, said there had been an unfair “degree of toxicity and flight embarrassment” surrounding international travel.
The airline chief said infection rates related to flights and foreign travel were low. “The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control came out earlier this week and showed that international travel was the cause of less than one percent of infections,” he said.
While he did not openly criticize the government or the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet), Mr. Moriarty said lawmakers had relied on “anecdotes” when it came to the Covid-19 risk from flights.
“There was certainly a very negative narrative towards travel and it was not really justified by the facts,” he told Brenan O’Connor on RTÉ Radio One.
“Traveling has not been the ogre that is described as … There was a degree of toxicity and flight embarrassment and we really have to get over that,” he said.
“In the summer, when transmission and infection rates in Ireland were very low, travel was described as a very significant risk, which was not true based on the data at the time, and is still false,” Moriarty said.
The Health Protection Surveillance Center (HPSC) said that of the 73,045 confirmed cases of Covid-19 analyzed through Dec. 1, 663 were imported from abroad.
Public health officials such as Medical Director Dr. Tony Holohan have consistently asked people to avoid traveling abroad this year, due to the risks of Covid-19. Moriarty said the lawmakers’ narrative “has made people feel insecure” about flying.
The impact of the pandemic had been “catastrophic” for the aviation industry and Aer Lingus had faced a “very challenging” year, it said.
“We were probably one of the industries that was the first to feel the effects of Covid-19 and we will probably be one of the last industries to fully emerge from it,” he said on Brendan O’Connor’s show.
Commenting on reports that an estimated 50,000 people will be traveling home from abroad this Christmas, Mr. Moriarty said it would be a “fraction” of the traffic during the holiday period of previous years.
Aer Lingus was still processing refund requests from customers who had booked flights but were unable to travel due to the pandemic, it said.
“We have had more than 2 million individual requests for coupons and refunds, a combination of the two, at this point we have processed more than 90 percent of them, more than 1.8 million, each of them has to be manually processed”, said.
The airline’s chief executive said that additional resources had been put in place to clear the remaining backlog of reimbursement requests “as quickly as possible.”
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