It's a great question and it's one of a broader perspective, given the premise of the question. COVID-19 has had unprecedented impacts in terms of how devastating it's been for Canada, for Canadians and for those around the world, and in what it's required in terms of government decision-making.
I've been a public servant for over 30 years and I have never seen anything like this, where essentially over the whole year the federal government, all of the provincial governments and governments around the world have had to make what would have been, before COVID, unimaginably quick and aggressive decisions to protect public health. It's been going on all year, so it's hard to find words to describe it.
To come back to the question about the most recent changes, it is a great example. That is simply one chapter in a very long book of difficult surprises and new developments that have to be responded to immediately.
I remember when the news broke about the U.K. variant of concern. That was just a couple of days before Christmas and it shocked the world. The implications of it have been destabilizing for the global fight against COVID. Within hours there were high-level meetings and discussions and analysis and examination of options. Within a number of hours, the government took action and we implemented, quite frankly, an unprecedented measure, which was to use the assessment done over the last 24 hours—during the day and over the night—from the chief public health officer of Canada, and combine the authorities of the Quarantine Act and the Aeronautics Act to actually ban all direct flights from the U.K.
That's something we've never done before for a public health reason, and we did it very quickly based on analysis that was done in a very compressed period to deal with that variant of concern.
We followed that up with an announcement on December 31. We already had strict travel measures—the 14-day quarantine and some of the toughest international travel measures in the world—and we immediately added, with essentially one week's notice, a requirement for pre-board COVID testing for all international arrivals into Canada. We worked with the industry and we consulted with them but on a very compressed timeline.
I would say that we knew it would be challenging for the industry to implement this on such an accelerated schedule, but we also felt it was imperative to do so in terms of protecting public health. I would say we are very appreciative and we recognize that the industry did a great job. There was a very rapid phase-in of that. We moved very quickly to a very high level of compliance, and that's become a significant new measure to protect public health.
In regular, as you might call it, public health peacetime, it would be unimaginable that we would so quickly put in place a measure and impose it, and so dramatically change the requirements regarding what airlines do to screen passengers from 57 countries that have flights to Canada, but it became not just something that was imaginable but something that happened under COVID.
We've seen that happening in terms of the successive steps in measures that have been taken since the discovery of the U.K. variant of concern, the Brazilian variant of concern and the South African variant of concern. There has been a successive ramp-up of some very tough measures, such that now people arriving by air in Canada actually end up with three COVID tests before they're free and clear of quarantine. That is pretty stringent stuff, but it's to try to keep out the devastating effect of these variants of concern.