Cathay Dragon 666

This is only based on a conversation between myself and a FA I've gotten to known over the years on Shanghai-Taipei route. Obviously to protect the person I won't name the airline. But that person told me almost all of the flight attendants plan on "protesting" working on Taiwan routes because they don't trust Taiwan numbers and think Taiwan route is dangerous. Whether that's true or not is not the point of this post, but the "protest" will begin late Oct. That person also said the "protest" may extend to other international routes that flight attendants deem unsafe destinations.

Just wanted to post that here and informed people who are planning a Shanghai-Taipei route in the near future. Personally I'm actually a bit shock this is even suggested, but I guess in these tough times anything can happen.

travelinmanS

Protests like these don’t tend to last very long in China.

moondog

Not only that, but as I'm sure you're aware, firing people in China can be extremely expensive. We usually try to get dead weight to resign on their own by giving them tasks like data entry, but most see through this ruse. One of my friends in Shenzhen laid off ~20 people several years ago. Rather than part with 500k, he opted to spend a month in jail, which gave him a lot of cool stories, and resulted in some lasting friendships with thugs, but he doesn't recommend the experience. I assuming protesting employees don't cede all of their rights under the labor law, but I'm guessing the termination costs are a lot lower.

ProleOnParole

Aren't flight attendants wearing (K)N95+ masks anyway? In which case it wouldn't really matter much whether a particular route is more "dangerous" than others.

tauphi

An N95 mask is not 100% virus-proof. In any case, Taiwan is probably not high risk.

ProleOnParole

I never said it were.

Anyway, the point is that at the moment it is reasonable for any person on any flight to assume that anyone else on the same flight could potentially be "dangerous" to them. What follows is that everybody needs to protect themselves accordingly, regardless of the origin or destination of the flight. And Chinese flight attendants, of all people, seem well-prepared to do just that, many of them sporting complete hazmat suits, so for them in particular there is no need to further differentiate between specific route endpoints in terms of risk.

tauphi

A flight to Australia or NZ from China would be completely safe. A flight to the UK or the US would not be.

uanj

I still do not get the reason for concern. Taiwan has gone over 200 days without any community transmission. A few cases are picked up among arrivals at Taipei (including from China) but everyone entering needs to quarantine for 2 weeks and quarantine is pretty closely monitored in Taiwan.

ProleOnParole

Only a while ago you were arguing that even N95 masks are not "100% virus-proof," which is quite a pedantic point to make, yet now you're declaring some flights "completely safe?" It's only fair to point out no flight is "100% virus-proof" either.

However, even if what you wrote were true, it still wouldn't invalidate the argument from my post that you just quoted in its entirety, so I'm not really sure what you're trying to convey in your reply to me. That some flights are more risky than others? Of course they are, but since it's difficult to ascertain the risk in advance other than in terms of very rough probabilities, and all it takes for transmission is potentially as little as a single brief exposure, it makes sense to use equally good protection measures for every flight, even as a passenger, and especially as a crew member. And this indeed appears to be what Chinese airlines seem to have settled upon for their staff, as far as I'm aware. In such circumstances (adequate protection onboard), any short-haul without overnighting might actually be the safest option for the crew.

Again, not really sure what you're trying to accomplish bringing countries from four continents into this discussion, especially considering you already said yourself that you don't consider Taiwan "high-risk" anyway, which means you must then also agree there is no need for the FAs to be alarmed, even if for different reasons.

tauphi

You mean the case where they mixed up the sample of the traveller from China with the sample of a traveller from France?

https://taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/.../29/2003745979

Case No. 530, a Taiwanese man who on Oct. 13 returned from China’s Jiangsu Province and tested positive on arrival in a PCR test with a relatively low CT-value, indicating a recent infection, tested negative in subsequent tests, which was an unusual situation, Chen said.

An investigation on testing procedures was launched on Oct. 15, and 31 people whose tests had been processed in the same machine as case No. 530’s samples were tested again, he said.

The retesting on Monday led to the positive test of a Taiwanese man in his 20s who returned from France, making him the nation’s 536th case, he added.

Chen said that after running DNA tests, the center found that the deep throat saliva specimens collected from the two cases had been mixed up during the examination process.

The CECC would inform the Chinese authorities and the National IHR Focal Point that it withdrew the confirmation of case No. 530, Chen said, adding that the center has encouraged laboratories to enhance their error-proofing mechanisms.

YuropFlyer

There were cases when travellers who stayed in Taiwan were tested positively when arriving in different countries.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/secur...1021-cna03.htm

The claim by the RoC government that Taiwan has been "200 days without any community transmission" isn't worth the paper it was published on.

They probably have relatively low number of cases, but they clearly don't have "no cases" as they claim. That's pure nonsense.

Obviously MUCH higher risk flying to/from the US or Europe at the moment.

tauphi

So far I have not seen any reports on the cycle count for the cases that Japan has detected in inbound travellers. For all we know, these could be high cycle count cases, which are usually associated with an old infection and are not infectious.
In particular, Japan detected a positive cases from a Japanese traveller from NZ, and NZ followed up by testing all close contacts and none turned out to be positive. Considering the fact that the traveller arrived in NZ at the start of the pandemic in March, it was probably an old infection.

plunet

They might well be protesting about this...

The CAAC has just updated guidance for Cabin Crew flying to/from countries with a high incidence of virus.

Its got fairly wide reporting, here is one site...
https://www.aviation24.be/organisati...19-protection/

A summary....