When Hamilton activist Cameron Topp got on a flight home from Taiwan, the local airline staff took his temperature, gave passengers masks and sanitized hard surfaces throughout the flight.

“You could tell everyone was really serious,” Topp said. “If someone coughed on the plane, everyone flinched.”

Topp and his family arrived at Pearson International airport at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night and were greeted, he said, by about a dozen airport staff with wheelchairs for older passengers.

“None of them had masks on. It did not seem as if they felt there was any urgent crisis,” he said.

Walking with his wife and two adult sons, Topp encountered officers in the airport hallway leading to the international customs processing area.

“They made a brief comment, like, ‘You guys understand you are going to need self-isolation right?’ ”

After 40 minutes inside Pearson — quicker than usual — nothing Topp witnessed made him feel that Canada’s largest airport is taking COVID-19 as seriously as the airports in Taiwan or Vietnam, where his journey began.

“It’s scary as hell that this is how it’s working right now.”

The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) faced a public backlash earlier this month, with passengers complaining of lax screening and overcrowding.

On Sunday, spokesperson Tori Gass said the GTAA is working with the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency to “ensure that all proper measures are taken with all international arriving passengers.”

“We’ve installed extra hand sanitizer stations in our terminals and we’ve implemented more frequent cleaning, including kiosks and in bathrooms,” Gass said in an email.

“High traffic areas are being regularly disinfected. We’ve used more than 1,000 litres of sanitizer, 180,000 sanitizing wipes and 1,500 litres of disinfectant …”

On March 15, Pearson started reconfiguring lines and holding planes on the tarmac during peak periods to slow foot traffic through the airport, Gass said. On March 21, they began airing announcements encouraging travellers to practise social distancing.

Roving teams of officers with the Canada Border Services Agency are distributing updated pamphlets with “the latest advice” that advises travellers to self-isolate, said CBSA spokesperson Jacqueline Callin. The officers (and all electronic kiosks) are supposed to ask passengers if they have a cough, difficulty breathing or a fever and require travellers to acknowledge they are asked to self-isolate for 14 days, Callin said.

Topp said passengers from his flight merged with those from three other airplanes at the immigration area. He said the other passengers, sporting suntans, appeared to be wrapping up March break. “Nobody seemed concerned,” said Topp, known for climate change activism and dumping manure in front of Premier Doug Ford’s constituency office.

After his family collected their bags, they walked through the crowd waiting to greet passengers and went upstairs to the Subway restaurant.

“It wasn’t just take-out like we expected,” he said. “There were six tables. None were far apart. And two people sitting there were border guards!”

Saira Haque flew from Dubai to Toronto with her two daughters on Saturday. She’s working on her master’s degree in the University of Toronto’s “aging and the life course.” Haque said she was horrified to see so many vulnerable elderly people at Pearson, with no system to monitor temperatures, as airports in Asia or the Middle East are doing.

“This was a shock to me,” Haque said.

The border guard asked her if she had been to China, Italy, Spain or Iran, where the outbreaks have been extreme. “I said, shouldn’t you be asking me if I’ve been to the United States?” America’s delayed response to the pandemic has placed many at risk.

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Haque said she and her children were wearing gloves and masks. Workers handed her a COVID-19 pamphlet when she left the airplane and she sanitized it with Lysol wipes immediately.

“Later, an elderly gentleman, he must have been 65, handed me another pamphlet. He said he worked for Health Canada. Why is he standing there in the airport, for the greater good?”

None of the border officers spoke to her about social isolation, she added.

“I know the risks. This is not a joke. But I’m sure a lot of people will take this lightly.”

Most disheartening was watching the airport luggage porters, greeting passengers while wearing no protection.

“Those poor porters, none are wearing masks. Why are they not taught how to protect themselves? Why are airport officials not telling them to wear gloves?”

On Twitter and Facebook, new postings appeared from passengers who arrived at Pearson over the weekend. Not all saw big crowds. Sandra Macklin made a Saturday afternoon connection, enroute to Mexico after visiting Dublin.

On Facebook, she said she landed in an empty Pearson with “no health checks upon arrival — only a pamphlet suggesting we should self-isolate and wash our hands more often — even though many of the passengers were coming from Spain.”

On Thursday, Karen K. Ho, a freelance business and culture reporter with a recent focus on COVID-19 and economics, flew home from New York City. The flight attendants were wearing protective gloves and masks. Ho spoke to a veteran flight attendant whose “voice cracked with emotion. She sounded like she was going to cry. She and everyone else on that team was hyper aware of the risk of catching COVID because of their job.”

Arriving at Pearson, the mood was not as intense. Ho has studied the responses of other international airports to the COVID-19 threat and said South Korea and China, for example, perform temperature checks using infra-red thermometer devices. She did not see any temperatures taken at Pearson. There were no crowds, Ho said, and she used ski gloves on the touch screen kiosks required for returning passenger check-ins. There was a question asking if the passenger felt ill, she said, and later, someone handed her a pamphlet on self-isolation.

Ho said she is now in her family home, living in one room with her own washroom, for the next 14 days.

She’s not certain that passengers were given enough information to understand the importance of self-isolation.

“I really worry that good intentions will not be enough for a pandemic.”

Moira Welsh is a Toronto-based investigative reporter. Follow her on Twitter: @moirawelsh

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