Covid 19 coronavirus: Dr. Siouxsie Wiles calls on Air New Zealand to stop serving food and drink, criticizes link to investigation

A leading scientist has criticized Air New Zealand for encouraging passengers to remove their masks by serving food and drink on short flights.

Infectious disease expert Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles tagged the national airline in a Twitter thread today and said she had contacted Air NZ multiple times to question the policy of serving snacks and beverages on domestic flights, but never got an answer.

The current approach meant that people took off their masks.

“They only serve a cookie or fries. It’s not that we can’t survive an hour or two without them,” said Wiles, an associate professor at the University of Auckland who has become one of the faces of the scientific community. response to Covid-19 said in the thread.

“This makes me very angry as they got a massive bailout from the government to keep them viable and surely in return they should be doing their part for our team of 5 million.”

Air NZ has been contacted for comment.

Wiles also objected to an Air NZ employee’s link to a new investigative job “from the guys from Plan B,” which advocates a relaxation of border restrictions.

“It is only because we follow Plan A and not Plan B that we can even safely fly internally at this time,” he wrote.

The report Wiles refers to, “Estimating the Effect of Selective Border Relaxation on Covid-19 in New Zealand,” calls for a “traffic light” system to be established at the border, where international travelers are classified according to the Covid-19 situation in your country of origin.

His co-authors included Dr. Simon Thornley, an epidemiologist at the University of Auckland and part of the “Plan B” group that argued that the lockdowns were an overreaction to Covid-19, and Air NZ Medical Director Dr. Ben Johnston.

The research was funded by Auckland International Airports. Wiles followed up his initial social media post by tweeting an apology to Air NZ, for wrongly claiming that the airline partially funded the investigation.

Under the proposed traffic light system, travel would not be restricted from Covid-19-free locations.

The report was released yesterday, but was written in August 2020.

The research predicts that more than 60,000 travelers per month would enter the country under the model, up from 11,271 who entered in August 2020.

Reacting to the investigation, Professor Michael Plank of Te Pūnaha Matatini and the University of Canterbury said that such a system would mean that violations such as the one recently observed at the Pullman Hotel would occur between 20 and 50 percent with more. frequency.

“The study authors say that the recent requirement for a pre-departure test will mitigate this risk. However, this is far from clear because pre-departure tests are not perfect and many travelers were already required to take pre-departure tests. departure before departure. your airline or country of transit “.