Quarantine: a miserable end to the holidays
Anxieties that France (and the Netherlands) could soon be removed from the Government’s travel corridor scheme had been growing for days – but when the news was finally announced, late last Thursday, holidaymakers were given just 30 hours’ notice of the deadline to get home, at 4am last Saturday. Rather than stay abroad, and spend two weeks in quarantine on their return, forbidden even from going out to walk the dog, thousands opted to make a dash for the border – leading to a huge increase in the price of airline tickets, and long queues at ferry terminals. Some £2bn was knocked off the stock market value of Europe’s travel industry; but Awaze, which runs two of the UK’s biggest holiday cottage websites, reported a 25% increase in traffic on Friday; and with warnings that Greece and Croatia were also about to be removed from the “safe list”, there was, by Monday, scarcely a static caravan or cottage to be had in the country.
People are furious, said Patrick O’Flynn in the Daily Express. It has been a miserable year, and after months cooped up with their children, families were desperate for a foreign holiday. How dismal, then, to find it abruptly cancelled. For some who missed the deadline to get home, the cost will be a miserable end to the school holidays in England and Wales. Others may lose their jobs. No wonder they’re upset. But in the end, they should have known that they were taking a risk: the PM had made it quite clear that countries could be taken off the safe list with little warning. His decision has angered his counterparts in Europe too, said Mutaz Ahmed on Reaction.life. Even so, it was sensible. The number of cases in France had risen to 32.1 per 100,000 last Thursday, compared with 18.5 in the UK. Downing Street is finally starting to feel it has a handle on this crisis; it cannot jeopardise our emergence from lockdown by letting the infection rate rise.
But to govern effectively, it also needs to have the trust of the people, said Jill Kirby in The Daily Telegraph – something it has repeatedly undermined with its “panicky” response to the pandemic. We’re told that countries will come off the “safe list” if their infection rate reaches 20 in 100,000 – but what if it’s more testing that’s causing the rate to go up? Unless hospital admissions are also rising, the figure means very little. As for the draconian quarantine rules, who will enforce them? Imposing unenforceable restrictions based on illogical rules will only damage public confidence and, with it, “any hope of social and economic recovery”.