Director of Diagnostics, Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital District (HUS) Lasse Lehtonen has called on the government to introduce stricter guidelines for passengers arriving at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport to take the coronavirus test.
According to Lehtonen, the new measures should be aimed especially at those who arrive in Finland in the so-called “high risk” countries, as about half of the country’s most recent new infections were found to be due to international travel.
“When people are completely free to choose whether to move their luggage back quickly and move forward or stay on the coronavirus test, it will inevitably encourage those from high-risk areas to go through the process,” Lehtonen said. “I think that monitoring should be stepped up.”
Lehtonen said that the airport’s coronavirus testing point is not being used enough, as there were some days last week when no one arriving at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport was given a coronavirus test.
“I am not surprised, as this has now been followed for a few weeks, and it is now said publicly that the figures currently being tested at the airport are quite small compared to the number of passengers and the risks posed by passengers in high-risk countries,” he said.
According to Lehtonen, HUSLAB’s testing capacity at the airport can be up to 200 tests per day, and according to Lehtonen, the number of his daily tests varies from zero to one hundred. A total of four hundred passengers were tested last week.
At the end of July, Lehtonen told Yle that he strongly believed that foreign passengers in particular would like to test Covid-19 at airports, worried that they would then have to isolate themselves during their trip.
Therefore, he said, arrivals from high-risk countries should have had better security screening tests since the test center began operations at the airport in early August.
Source: The Nordic Page