Homeland Security Today: COVID-19 is the latest disease to raise concerns over contagions spread through air travel. In 2015, during the Ebola epidemic, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report recommended that the Department of Transportation (DOT) develop a comprehensive national aviation preparedness plan for communicable disease outbreaks. It has yet to do so.
Such a plan could have improved coordination between public-health and aviation sectors during COVID-19 to address issues like passenger screening, says a new GAO statement, which also points out that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has conducted limited research on disease transmission during air travel or in airports.
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