How can Britain move on from quarantine measures?
Q I read that the transport secretary has promised Britain will be a trailblazer in a new travel system to allow people to escape quarantine. How is it going to work?
John K
A In June, just as barriers elsewhere in the world were coming down, and British holidaymakers and the travel industry felt hopeful about the prospects for the summer, the government took a trailblazing step: imposing mandatory self-isolation for travellers arriving from anywhere, regardless of how low infections were in a particular location.
Another world-beating handbrake turn occurred a month later, with dozens of European countries opened up for adventure for UK visitors. Within a couple of weeks these so-called travel corridors started closing down again.
The quarantine rule, coupled with the simultaneous Foreign Office warning against all but essential travel,
remains as effectively a ban on international movement to and from almost all countries. Which isn’t great for those of us who long for adventures abroad, nor for the UK economy when “travel and tourism [is] so vital to our national prosperity, contributing over £250bn a year”. Those are the words of the transport secretary, Grant Shapps. Fortunately he has a cunning plan, as he told Abta this week. During the travel association’s online convention, he revealed plans to implement a “test and release” regime to reduce the self-isolation period in the UK: “A single test for international arrivals around a week after arrival.”
Even if the duration of quarantine were halved, though, it would still deter a large number of prospective travellers. So Shapps added “We’re also working on schemes with partners and countries to establish whether self-isolation could take place before departure.”
Unfortunately, the Department for Transport is giving no further details of how this might work. So it is pure speculation for me to come up with an example. Perhaps a New Yorker who wanted to come to the UK could self-isolate at home in Manhattan for two weeks and take a Covid-19 test shortly before the flight to London. Assuming it is negative, she or he would presumably be able to cross the Atlantic and step from the plane without needing to quarantine on arrival.