India will be added to the Government’s “red list” for international travel as a “precautionary measure” after 103 people in the U.K. were found carrying the country’s Covid variant. From Friday, Brits coming from or through India will have to quarantine in Government approved hotels for 11 days, costing £1,750 per person (or £2,400 for two people sharing a room). Those who break these quarantine rules could face a fine of up to £10,000. The Guardian has the story.
India will be added to England’s travel “red list” from 4am on Friday, Matt Hancock has announced, as surge testing got under way to tackle a growth in cases of a coronavirus variant first discovered in the country.
The Health Secretary said that of 103 people in the UK who have so far been found to be carrying the Indian variant, the “vast majority” had links to international travel – suggesting at least some have been infected by community transmission.
He said scientists were working to see if the variant had any “concerning characteristics” such as being more transmissible or resistant to vaccines, but that in the meantime the move had been taken on a “precautionary basis”.
The decision means most travel from India will be banned, with only UK citizens and residents allowed to arrive from the country, and all those who do must quarantine in a hotel for 10 days.
Hancock admitted that the “biggest risk” to coronavirus restrictions being eased was a “new variant that the vaccine does not work as well against”, so surge testing would be rolled out “to make sure that we limit the spread as much as possible”.
Labour has (of course) supported the Government’s decision, with Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth saying that “we must act fast when the situation is controllable because in a few weeks time it might not be”.
The addition of India means there will be 40 countries on the Government’s travel “red list”, including parts of southern Africa and all of South America. While some have said that the Indian Covid variant could “scupper” Britain’s “roadmap” out of lockdown, others, such as JCVI member Professor Adam Finn, have said that this verdict is “pessimistic” because immunity from vaccines “won’t just disappear”. The announcement that India has been added to the “red list” came after the Prime Minister cancelled his trip to the country due to take place next Monday.
“I do think it’s only sensible to postpone, given what’s happened in India, the shape of the pandemic there,” he said.
The Guardian’s report is worth reading in full.
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So its not immediate then? That will give the MPs and government officials time to get back here. Farcical !
Its always struck me as odd the way that new emergency measures are announced with several days notice.
“I must tell this House that the United Kingdom will be in a State of War with (country) starting next Monday”. ?
The woman on the bed is saying
‘I don’t care what the policy is, I woke up and discovered a man in my bed and I want YOU to get rid of him’
“Precautionary”
From now on until whenever all this is recognised as the madness that it is, “precautionary” will be wheeled out as the excuse for futile restrictions imposed on a whim, without supporting evidence. Any foreign travel plans will be forever subject to last minute derailment, and if you go abroad you risk not being able to get back.
Absolutely right! Zero Covid is now the name of the game. At the same time the crushing of the aviation industry was always part of the Green Covid plan.
What happens if you are a citizen abroad but you don’t have £1,750 to pay a hotel bill?
Variants ad infinitum. Keep taking the new shots devised by Big Pharma plebs whilst we dream up the next reason to avoid allowing you to live a normal life.
There’s a reaon they don’t want people socialsing with others and its got bugger all to do with public health. The ground is slowly moving beneath the politicians but it needs to happen quicker or we’ll be back in lockdown again come Autumn.
Not forgetting that the government are still targeting minority groups which includes people who go abroad and people who go to pubs.
The majority sit at home watching telly.
We can see the wheels turning already.
New variants, irresponsible people, ‘vaccine hesitancy’ etc etc. Any one of these could well be used to drag out the farce until the elderly start popping their clogs again in the autumn and – presto! – the enabling act is rolled over.
A side note to the site eds: It would be awfully good to see Lockdown Sceptics grow a pair and apply the same critical thinking to these experimental gene therapies that they’ve applied to the rest of the bollocks. Way too little is being done in this regard and I’m becoming accustomed to paying more attention to the comments than the copy. There’s now a clear gap between editorial content and reader sentiment.
It’s almost as though the site bods want to keep one foot in the mainstream tent for when this all blows over (whenever that is). I felt the same when Sumption lost his gumption and thought it entirely reasonable to submit to the needle. Having ripped enormous holes in UKG policy up to that point, it was dismaying to see his formidable critical faculties evade him over that issue.
I’ve looked at the numbers for England and Scotland since the start of the year, calculating the rolling seven day case averages (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases) and adjusting for population size.
Scotland’s transport secretary Michael Matheson said, on February 10th, that England’s ‘red list’ policy for hotel quarantines for travellers to the UK was ‘inadequate’ compared to Scotland’s policy of ‘hotel quarantine for all’ (bar the the ‘exempt’ list).
What did we find in the data in the weeks after the policies were introduced?
On every day since March 8th, 3 weeks after the divergent policies were introduced, England has had a lower rolling average case rate (per million population) than Scotland.
The rolling average case numbers have dropped by 81% in England, and by 72% in Scotland, since February 15th. If anything, there’s very little difference overall between the England and Scotland case numbers, by population, despite the different approaches to quarantine.
Surely there’s still too much Covid in both England and Scotland for imported cases (and therefore border policies) to be a particularly salient issue?
We need a new variant of SAGE, with more Real scientists rather than Behavioural and Data and those with an agenda. The government are getting the answers it wants to shut down hospitality and travel
As if by magic a new variant appears
More than 100 cases of the Devon variant (also known as B.1.620.5) have been confirmed in the UK. That may sound like a large number, but it is less than 1% of the Covid samples that have been analysed for their genetic make-up in the UK.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced, as surge testing got underway to tackle growth in cases of a coronavirus variant first discovered in the county. This will make sure that we limit the spread as much as possible.
Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth is supporting the Government, saying that “we must act fast when the situation is controllable because in a few weeks time it might not be”.
What exactly is the point of categorizing countries into “green”, “amber” or “red”, other than to pander to xenophobia? It sounds like Trump’s (worthless) China travel ban all over again!
It’s likely that even the variants of concern will turn out to be little more than a cold if they infect a vaccinated person (which would make the policy unnecessary), but in the nightmare scenario where they can still lead to life-threatening illness even in a vaccinated person, then such a border policy is clearly utterly inadequate.
Didn’t 2020 show us that the only policy that would actually work to keep out the virus (or indeed a particular variant) is the Australian/NZ one of forcing all incomers into 14-day hotel quarantine regardless of origin?
Given the serious drawbacks of such a policy: the death of international tourism, a de facto ban on immigration, and (in the UK context) violation of the Good Friday Agreement plus a need to reconfigure our trade with Europe to be entirely unaccompanied, I think it’s just as well that it’s unlikely that such a “zero <insert variant here>” policy will actually be needed…