Is quarantine common sense or a weapon in negotiations with Europe?
‘As many as 73 per cent of the public say fear of the virus will stop them flying this summer’
It was in late March when it first emerged that Priti Patel was pressing for quarantine to restrict arrivals coming to the UK from high-risk countries such as Iran, the US and China, but it was not until late last month that it was officially announced. Home Office figures show 18.1million people entered the UK between Jan 1 and the end of March without health checks, including people from coronavirus hotspot countries. Of these, just 273 were quarantined – as many as 20,000 infected people may have entered in that time.
The question that these data beg is why quarantine is being introduced now, when the Government’s own chief scientific adviser says it is most effective if the infection rate in the receiving country is lower than those from which they are arriving.
Imposing quarantine made sense when at the start Britain lagged behind Italy, Spain, France and China, but now our rate is higher than theirs.
Prof Robert Dingwall, a member of the Sage advisory group, summed it up: “We would really need to get the level [of infection] significantly further down before quarantine started to become a useful tool.”
This led Michael O’leary, the boss of Ryanair, which is taking joint legal action against quarantine, to claim it is a “political stunt” especially when our half-hearted approach is compared with other countries’ quarantines.
Unlike New Zealand, which quarantined people in Governmentpaid-for hotels and yesterday declared itself coronavirus-free, international arrivals to the UK are largely being trusted to self-isolate for 14 days, with minimal checks on their movements.
Ministers maintain it is necessary to prevent a second wave of coronavirus, which would not only be economically damaging if lockdown was reimposed but also politically devastating for trust in the Government’s ability to manage a major crisis.
But Henry Smith, the Tory MP who chairs the new cross-party Future of Aviation group, believes it is more a case of Government stubbornness and a desire to provide a fearful public psychological reassurance, “rather than hard public health evidence”.
This is supported by ministers citing polls that show as many as 73 per cent of the public say fear of the virus will stop them flying this summer.
“A feature of most Governments in my experience is that once they have announced something publicly, even if it subsequently emerges it is not such a great idea, they don’t back down. It’s almost a matter of facesaving,” he said.
Which brings us to the theory that quarantine will help fuel a surge in staycations to help revive the ailing UK tourist industry.
Announcing an investment package to support British holidays, Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, declared: “I much prefer British holidays to holidays overseas.”
Others suspect a more Machiavellian reasoning – that to adopt a more scientifically valid approach by barring visitors from high-risk countries while allowing in those from low-risk states would anger the US and Donald Trump at a key moment in trade talks.
What most agree is that Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s senior adviser, has been a key driver of the quarantine policy. Paul Charles, one of the organisers behind the Quash Quarantine campaign and chief executive of PC Consultancy, said: “This comes from Dominic Cummings fighting a pro-brexit policy. There is no doubt that is what is behind this. There is no scientific evidence.
“Dominic Cummings and Priti Patel are using this as a tactic within the EU negotiations to be able to prove to the EU how powerful the British consumer is to the European countries. By stopping them from going abroad this summer, they are hurting European economies, because the British are the number one tourists market in Spain and Italy.”
With the Tory MPS, airports, airlines and more than 500 of the biggest names in the travel industry now ranged against the “economically-damaging” quarantine, there is a growing expectation that it will be watered down, if not scrapped, to salvage at least some of the remaining summer holiday season.