(ROB MUNRO / iNFOnews.ca)

After just announcing that free COVID tests are now available to the 1,000 people working at Kelowna International Airport, officials are scrambling to figure out how to implement a mandatory vaccination plan.

The testing station will remain operating, even after mandatory vaccination is fully in place at the end of November, but it has created some frustration for airport manager Sam Samaddar.

“We had an announcement today on vaccine policies for both travellers and employees with very little to no consultation so we’re left scrambling with three weeks to implement this,” Samaddar told iNFOnews.ca, Oct. 6. “That’s not a good way to run a business, any kind of business. To understand what the cost structure is going to be to do this, we don’t know the details. We’ll know the details next week.”

Those details will include things like how to ensure that everyone is fully vaccinated.

The federal government announced earlier today that all federal employees, all employees in federally regulated transportation business and all travellers will have to be vaccinated by Oct. 30 and be fully vaccinated by the end of November.

That includes everyone who works at Kelowna airport, whether it be the airport office employees, baggage handlers, cleaning staff or restaurant workers.

The COVID testing station was built in the spring of 2020 for liquid natural gas workers flying out of the airport. Its availability was expanded to the general public (for a fee) this spring as air travel started to pick up and testing was required by some destinations.

READ MORE: COVID tests available for international travellers flying from Kelowna airport

Expanding its use to airport workers seemed the logical next step.

“We look at safety as being a cornerstone of our business,” Samaddar said. “We look at things in a layered approach in terms of safety, so we felt the voluntary testing, made available to our staff who could be asymptomatic, being able to offer that was a prudent thing to do in terms of adding this other layer of safety.”

He’s encouraging all airport workers to voluntarily test for COVID twice a week since, even if they are fully vaccinated, they may be infected with COVID but not have symptoms when they go into work.

In the past week, from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, 29.3% of new COVID cases in B.C. were in people who were fully vaccinated.

READ MORE: Mandatory COVID vaccinations for visitors to B.C. health-care facilities

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