Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Quarantine lifted... but they flee Croatia
Cases: 323,313 Deaths: 41,405 Cases: 23,017,531 Deaths: 799,763
from Zagreb to London yesterday morning - up from £82 four days before.
One couple from Keighley, West Yorks, stumped up £800 to travel home from northern Croatia via Munich after finding it impossible to book a direct flight in time to beat the quarantine.
Urged to end blanket bans on nations and opt for regional air bridges, Mr Shapps said it would be too “difficult” to implement. He added: “I do sympathise. I had to actually quarantine myself after I changed the rules.
“This is a very unpredictable virus which unfortunately just doesn’t play as far as the way that it can just sometimes take off in a country and I think anyone travelling this year will know that there are risks involved.”
He added: “Indeed, we’ve added Portugal back on to the list, but you need to go with your eyes open there or anywhere that you travel this year because coronavirus is just a fact of life, we’re having to live with it.”
Experts called for Covid-19 tests at airports and during holidays to solve the quarantine merry-go-round but Mr Shapps said it was “a bit more complicated than is sometimes suggested”.
But Mr Charles of the PC Agency hit back and said: “Consumers have to be given clear information and the only answer is testing which will take away the need to quarantine.
“The majority of people being quarball antined are perfectly healthy.” Karl Whitburn is returning early from Split so his wife, an NHS nurse originally from Croatia, will not miss work.
Mr Whitburn, 51, a data analyst from London, thinks that with rearranged flights, unused car hire and other costs, they will lose £600-800.
He believes the Government should have done more to help Britons in Croatia get home, saying: “They gave us the notice on Thursday they’re shutting down 4am on Saturday, there’s only about four flights before then, and this beach here is full of British people,”
Each Covid-19 sufferer infects one other on average when the R rate is at 1.
The latest transmission growth rate, measuring the fluctuation of new cases per day in the UK, is between –3% and 1%, a slight change from –4% and –1% last week.
This means the number of new infections is somewhere between shrinking by 3% and growing by 1% every day.