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5 July, 2022

Travel DAZE: Dr. Nick Coatsworth on getting back in touch with travel

The Travel DAZE audience was blessed to have infectious diseases expert, Dr. Nick Coatsworth, to discuss travelling safely post-COVID.

Coatsworth began his speech with a tale of a woman who was too short to be an air hostess and became a ground staff member.

This woman was in the right place at the right time and found herself in an aeroplane advertisement alongside a little elephant from the London Zoo. This woman is Coatsworth’s mother.

“And ladies and gentlemen, what I can tell you is that travel is in my DNA,” Coatsworth said.

His father also worked in air travel, as a cadet for Qantas and then as an airport manager, and was full of tales of former Prime Ministers, Walt Disney, and working in Fiji.

In fact, Coatsworth is the only member of his family not directly in the travel industry.

He continued his speech with how people in travel can look forward and the lessons people can draw from the pandemic.

“We want to look forward,” Coatsworth said.

And that’s what travel has always done, he said, it’s progressed throughout time.

Going from only available to the wealthy to easily accessible for the everyday person, travel has significantly progressed. That was until the pandemic hit, Coatsworth said.

The infectious diseases expert discussed how people handled the pandemic differently and how the variety of opinions on the disease had a massive impact on not just travel but the struggles of public health in the age of COVID.

Coatsworth discussed how in September 2020, he felt that there needs to be a point where Australia opened back up and how people need to understand the roles of social interventions and their effectiveness on the populus.

Moving on from the difficulties of COVID, Coatsworth asked how a very well-vaccinated country manage international travel, considering its residents will be visiting countries that aren’t as well vaccinated.

He acknowledged that there will be further variants in the future, but the reality is that the excitement of travel will overcome people’s incessant fears about COVID.

Coatsworth then discussed how he was hopping on a flight to England later that day and shared some jokes about mask-wearing on planes with the audience.

He concluded his speech with a video from LifeVerse and was then nearly taken out by the TravelDAZE gorilla.

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Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au

coronavirus covid Nick Coatsworth Travel DAZE Travel Daze 2022