If I've learned something about people during the pandemic, it's that the average person is far less intelligent and far less compliant than I previously believed. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out this was caused by people not complying with protocols. Or at the very least, not having an understanding of the fact that COVID transmission is aerosol, and that breathing reshared air even for a few seconds is a high risk activity.

I would call that uneducated rather than unintelligent. Not everyone is an expert on Covid-19, most people here aren't. We look for and rely on trusted sources to get our information about it.

But many mainstream trusted sources have been carrying out misinformation/divertion campaigns by focusing prevention on hand hygiene and vaccination, instead of explaining the actual mechanism of transmission. So unless they're curious and proactive about searching for neutral information (which is orthogonal to intelligence), many people by default believe transmission happens by touching surfaces, or cannot happen when one has taken vaccines, for instance.

Reminds me of the fact that you can fool people into believing the school system is effective, that a record number of tractors was produced, that the leader got elected with 96% of the vote, but you simply cannot fool people into thinking they aren't starving to death.

Not sure I follow. Haven't Trump and Bolsonaro et al done surprisingly well at convincing people they aren't dying?

Scientists heading to the Belgian station are probably fairly smart. As for compliance, my experience with highly intelligent people is that they tend to be less compliant or predictable than others, so you may be right that this was due to a lapse in compliance.

When things don't make any sense, or show poor results, it's hard to comply to, which has been the case in the last two years with our betters on a power trip.

Intelligence does not necessarily imply compliance, or vice versa.

Human error/non-compliance is a thing, to be honest. Although, this can also mean the procedures do not work as well.

Good point. However, one can’t conclude that with any reasonable certainty from the article.

Yep. Likely self-supervised isolation/quarantine and someone broke the rules.

That said, omicron is apparently insanely infectious, so it could have been something as simple as a member of the ground crew being inside the plane for a bit to stock or check something.

Or some asymptomatic carrier administering a set of the test, or some of the cleaning staff coughing in the room before the tests.

That they focused on the person action (quarantines, tests) and not the environment (transfer shuttles, testing rooms, bathrooms and dressing rooms) kids hints the latter as a source. After all, you drop your mask during testing, and I've seen places doing it in a small, unventilated room with no pause between each person.