A first plane transporting Europeans, around 200 employees and their families, to China after weeks of confinement took off Friday evening from the German airport in Frankfurt. On arrival in Tianjin, south of Beijing, "we expect to have very long checks, a temperature measurement, tests on the corona, on the antibodies and we will then have to be fourteen days in quarantine," said before his departure Bernd Poth.
The man in charge of quality control at Audi, a subsidiary of Volkswagen, was one of the few people in the departure hall of Terminal-1. Like the other passengers on board this charter plane, whose flight is managed by the German airline Lufthansa, Bernd Poth had returned in February from China before this country closed its borders.
Read also: Coronavirus: airlines that suspend their flights to China
"We are not concerned about security, but we are a little worried about quarantine, we do not know what will await us there , " said Alexander Ophoven, who works in the manufacturing of components in the aeronautical industry. Until the last minute, "we did not know if this plane would leave or not," he added.
In early April, international flights to and from China fell to around 1% of the pre-epidemic level. But as of Monday June 1, the limit will increase from 134 to 407 flights per week, far from the approximately 9,000 in the period preceding the propagation of the Covid-19. A second plane will depart from Frankfurt for Shanghai on June 3.