Hong Kong leader defends Covid flight ban policy

A cargo plane prepares to land at Hong Kong Worldwide Airport – Copyright AFP Bertha WANG

Hong Kong’s chief on Thursday defended her policy of temporarily banning flight routes that convey in coronavirus circumstances, as a foremost airline field determine warned the metropolis experienced fallen “off the map” as an aviation hub.

The city’s airport was previously a person of the world’s busiest but has been largely slash off throughout the pandemic as Hong Kong hews to China’s rigid zero-Covid coverage.

“Circuit breaker” principles mean any airline that provides in a few or extra contaminated passengers on a one flight is suspended from traveling that route for seven days.

Metropolis chief Carrie Lam defended the coverage on Thursday, stating flights ended up bringing in bacterial infections “probably because of the incredibly relaxed method adopted in quite a few places” all over the earth.

Authorities have supplied some floor, lifting a entire flight ban on 9 countries previously this thirty day period subsequent growing anger from the company local community and Hong Kongers stranded abroad.

Lam said much more than 1,000 inhabitants have returned to Hong Kong every day this thirty day period, compared to just 200 a day formerly.

“It is not correct to say that this travel easing has no effects,” she claimed.

Her comments arrived as the director standard of the Worldwide Air Transportation Association, Willie Walsh, warned Hong Kong was “effectively off the map”.

“(Hong Kong) is likely to lag drastically behind the restoration that we’re looking at elsewhere,” Walsh explained to reporters on Wednesday in estimates carried by Bloomberg Information and the South China Morning Submit.

Momentary flight bans have been regularly invoked, throwing journey programs into chaos as citizens scramble to e book new routes and alter required hotel quarantine bookings.

Six airways such as Emirates and Cathay Pacific have experienced routes banned this week.

Emirates’ Dubai-Bangkok-Hong Kong route has been suspended six times for a total of 77 times this calendar year, according to Bloomberg.

Walsh said Hong Kong’s restrictions have been “very extreme and have led specifically to the cancellation of a ton of providers, with airways efficiently obtaining it incredibly difficult, if not not possible, to work there”.

Very last month 11 airlines and logistics giants despatched a letter to the government contacting for the removing of Covid-19 tests necessities for flight crews ahead of take-off and on arrival.

Prior to the pandemic, Hong Kong’s airport hosted about 200,000 passengers a day.

But the finance hub — which dubs itself “Asia’s Entire world City” — is now one particular of the world’s most isolated sites.

Lam’s administration suggests there can be no modify from zero-Covid even however the controls proved mainly ineffective this calendar year when the Omicron variant tore through.

Hong Kong has due to the fact recorded 1 of the world’s best mortality premiums from the virus.