Travel quarantine is completely useless, says expert
THE Government’s travel quarantine is “completely useless” and should be “dropped as soon as possible”, a leading epidemiologist has claimed.
Prof Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, yesterday joined a growing list of MPS, scientists and business leaders calling for Prime Minister Boris Johnson to ditch the policy.
Discussing the effectiveness of the blanket travel restrictions, which require all overseas arrivals to isolate for 14 days, Prof Piot said the move would only have “made sense at the very beginning, before we had cases”.
He added that, due to the UK’S high infection rates, the quarantine would “not contribute much” towards suppressing Covid-19 and was simply inflicting “enormous” economy damage.
It came as Ryanair resumed flights 10 days ahead of schedule, with the first plane departing to Alicante yesterday from East Midlands airport.
The budget airline had been due to restart flights on July 1, but has now confirmed that it will accelerate its plans, despite the quarantine remaining in place.
Separately, Tui confirmed that it would resume its holiday programme within three weeks, stating that it had “absolute confidence” that travel restrictions will have been relaxed by then. The UK’S biggest tour operator announced it will serve eight destinations across Spain and Greece from July 11, with holidays available in Crete, Rhodes, Kos, Corfu, Tenerife, Lanzarote, Majorca and Ibiza.
The Daily Telegraph understands that ministers plan to announce a series of travel corridors, also known as “air bridges”, before the quarantine is due to be reviewed on June 29.
It is hoped that an announcement can be made before the end of this week, although a date has not been finalised.
The deals, which will enable quarantine-free travel to and from partner countries, are expected to be limited to a number of short-haul European destinations initially, with restrictions remaining in place elsewhere.
However, Prof Piot, who discovered Ebola and was a lead researcher on Aids, told the BBC’S Andrew Marr Show the quarantine policy should be scrapped entirely. He added: “There are measures that are completely useless like quarantine for returning travellers. That only would have made sense at the beginning when we had no cases.
“That’s not going to contribute much and the damage it’s going to cause the country, the economy, will be enormous, so let’s hope that rule is dropped and we concentrate on what works.”
While the Government says quarantine is necessary to prevent the virus being reimported to the UK, ministers have admitted that the Scientific Advisory Committee for Emergencies was not asked to sign off on the decision.
When arriving in the UK, passengers
‘Quarantine for returning travellers would have made sense at the beginning when we had no Covid-19 cases’
are currently required to provide their contact and travel details, as well as the address they will isolate at.
Fines of up to £1,000 apply in England if a police spot check finds that people are not complying, although, to date, none has been issued.
Critics argue that the policy is counter intuitive, as the prevalence of the disease remains much higher in the UK than in other European countries.
Business leaders have also warned that the policy is having a devastating impact on the aviation and tourism industries, with the Centre for Economics and Business Research placing the cost to the UK economy at £650m a week.