No plans to introduce coronavirus testing for passengers at Doncaster Sheffield Airport as Grant Shapps says it is 'under active review'

There are no plans at the moment for Doncaster Sheffield Airport to test passengers for Covid-19 when arriving back into South Yorkshire, as the Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapps says the issue is “under active review”.

Doncaster Council’s director of public health, Dr Rupert Suckling, responding to a question from Mexborough Coun Andy Pickering on airport testing, said capacity issues meant this was not possible at this time and there was no Government guidance on this.

Currently, people arriving at the airport testing centre showing symptoms of coronavirus are being tested and passengers arriving back asymptomatic do not have to be tested.

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At present, those who arrive from countries such as Spain and France are being asked to self-isolate for 14 days due to rising cases in those countries.

There are no plans to introduce coronavirus testing for passengers who land at Doncaster Sheffield AirportThere are no plans to introduce coronavirus testing for passengers who land at Doncaster Sheffield Airport
There are no plans to introduce coronavirus testing for passengers who land at Doncaster Sheffield Airport

But Dr Suckling said the travel and aviation industries are in early discussions with Government ministers to rolling out testing for passengers on arrival and after five days.

“The current UK policy on testing is only test people with symptoms – so we currently wouldn’t signpost people who arrive at Doncaster Sheffield Airport to go to the testing station,” Dr Suckling said.

“The airline industry is speaking to Government on whether they can bring in a testing procedure to test people immediately on arrival and then five days later who produce the period of quarantine.

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“At the moment, the advice for people coming back from the allotted air corridors is to go about their daily business assuming they had no symptoms and for those from somewhere no longer within an air corridor they have to quarantine for 14 days.

“I do think we will see movement on that in response to the aviation and the travel industry.

Coun Pickering added: “The reason I mention this, is because we do seem to have an opportunity with the testing site at the airport – is something we could push for?”

“We would only want to press for that if there was sufficient capacity at the airport testing station,” Dr Suckling said.

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“Sometimes it seems planes land at Doncaster within a few minutes of each other and we’d want to use up all the testing capacity for the people from the area who are symptomatic.

“It is something that we are pursuing with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government in terms of how we want to respond to air traffic passengers.”

Mr Shapps said suggestions that airport testing could halve an individual’s quarantine time are not necessarily true, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “But we do review these things constantly and every month we review the month that we’re taking to quarantining, so these things are under active review.

“It’s just that I don’t want to sort of bottle false hope by saying it’s just as simple as test at the airport … I often hear this: ‘Why you don’t you just test at the airport, be done with it?’ The answer is because it won’t tell you what you need to know.”

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He added that testing at airports would not work “on its own” and that airport bosses “accept that as well”.

Mr Shapps also ruled out introducing regional quarantine travel rules to avoid blanket bans on entire countries, saying it “just isn’t practical”.

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