Transportation industry supports more regular rapid mass tests but needs urgent support
The pressure on the transportation industry during the pandemic has shifted from moving citizens to keeping a core transportation system operational with a skeleton workforce to ensure freight and key essential workers can continue to move.
A secondary effect of this shift is the sudden change in sources of revenue for transportation operators, with many experiencing an unexpected shortfall in their finances. The industry has followed all safety measures outlined by governments and authorities, including sanitation, social distancing, mask-wearing, and testing. However, the industry needs more support to cope with new pressures on supply in the spring of 2021.
U.S. companies ranging from Colgate-Palmolive Co. to Boot Barn Holdings Inc. -- and others across Europe and Asia -- have highlighted the supply strains in recent days. The Federal Maritime Commission launched an inquiry late last year into port congestion, but bottlenecks persist heading into the seasonal peak before Chinese New Year in mid-February.
“Our freight costs will probably be a pressure point for us over the next, I don’t know, three months or six months,” Greg Hackman, chief operating officer at California-based Boot Barn, said last week, citing port pileups that are affecting inventories.
Stephen Bartlett, chairman of the Association of Freight Software Suppliers, warned that the disruption may be about to escalate.
“There could be more disruption as trucks come through that aren’t prepared with paperwork or drivers who haven’t been tested for COVID-19. There will be more issues,” he said.
Regular rapid mass testing will help facilitate a more significant opening of other large industries such as infrastructure engineering, rail travel, entertainment, hospitality, manufacturing, and retail, among many more. By testing staff regularly in industry with rapid results, consumers and employees can feel safe returning to these environments and employers can have greater certainty on working hours, capacity and avoid further disruption.
The UK has led the way with its “test to suppress” Moonshots programme, announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, including the beginning of mass testing in education with teachers and staff in secondary schools beginning self-testing during February with primary schools following shortly after. In guidance from Public Health England, school staff have been asked to use lateral flow tests twice a week to ensure they are COVID free, with other nations expected to follow as they try to identify new variants and strains of the virus so that they are able to reduce the need for future likelihood and closures in education.
The key benefit of these lateral flow antigen tests is their ability to identify asymptomatic carriers of the virus and prevent transmission at the earliest point. This has become even more vital due to the ability for the virus to mutate to become more infectious as we have seen in the UK (Kent), South Africa and Brazil.
The World Nano Foundation and pandemic experts say regular use of inexpensive mass lateral flow rapid antigen test kits is the way to beat COVID-19, its variants, and future viruses. The adoption of rapid mass testing across populations can help pinpoint cases of the virus, reducing the likelihood of transmission and allowing those in education to feel more secure when returning to busy schools and universities, as well as allowing education professionals to deliver the highest standard of teaching once again.
As vaccination quickens across the board, the next prize is to get the world’s economies moving, with mass frequent testing as the key, using the mantra ‘test to suppress’, and as an early warning system to protect against new strains and future outbreaks.