Gatwick’s CEO Wants An Unworkable Quarantine Plan For The UK

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Over recent weeks the UK government has shown itself to be capable of introducing quarantine measures on arrivals into the country with little to no notice and, in a recent press conference, Gatwick’s CEO suggested that the government was taking the wrong approach to its quarantine restrictions and put forward a suggestion of his own. Unfortunately for him, it doesn’t take a genius to see that his plan is wholly unworkable.

A Quick Recap

On 8 June the UK government introduced quarantine restrictions that affected the vast majority of arrivals into the UK. The measures were poorly thought through, ineffective, mostly not enforced, and, frankly, more than a little idiotic. Less than a month after the restrictions were put in place, the UK authorities effectively admitted that their measures had been mostly pointless by announcing that the rules would no longer apply to visitors from 60 countries.

The biggest criticisms that I (and most people) had of the UK government’s initial quarantine plan was that it was introduced at least three months too late and it didn’t take into account the fact that a good number of the countries covered by the quarantine rules had the virus more or less under control and had significantly lower levels of transmission than the UK.

What Happened Next?

When the UK government relaxed its quarantine rules for select countries at the beginning of July, it also said that it would be keeping a careful watch on the rate of virus transmission in those countries and taking action if and when it saw the rate of transmission rising to unacceptable levels in those countries.

True to its word, when Covid-19 cases in and around Catalonia started to spike at the end of July, the UK government reintroduced a mandatory 14-day quarantine period on travelers returning from Spain and gave less than 6 hours notice that it was doing so. Not entirely unexpectedly, the UK government managed to mess up the quarantine rules for travelers returning from Spain but, to give it some credit, it wasn’t hard to see why the quarantine rules were brought back (it was the right decision) and it’s hard to complain that the rules were brought back too quickly (as a lot of people did) if you previously argued that the government had taken too long to introduce quarantine measures when the virus first started to spread.

On Friday, 7 August the UK government repeated this trick and announced quarantine rules on travelers arriving from Andorra, the Bahamas and Belgium and, just last week, new quarantine rules for travelers arriving from France and the Netherlands (amongst others) were also introduced with only a little over 24 hours notice.

What’s The Issue?

The travel industry has argued that by introducing quarantine measures at such short notice its plans are being thrown into turmoil and that the measures are putting serious constraints on the industry’s attempts to recover from the crisis.

What Has Stewart Wingate Suggested?

RoutesOnline has published the following comments that the CEO of London Gatwick Airport made at a recent press conference:

“If you look at Spain, it’s obviously a very large country with different rates of infection,” 

“If there are certain regions where it’s safe to travel to and from, we very much encourage the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Department for Transport to take a more regionalized approach.

“That means as we go forward, we can start to open up more corridors to areas where it is safe to fly to and from.”

Essentially, Mr. Wingate’s suggestion is that the UK government should only impose quarantine restrictions on travelers returning from select areas of certain countries and not on travelers returning from those countries as a whole.

Thoughts

I hope that, as CEO of an airport that has seen its operations decimated, Mr. Wingate has only put forward this suggestion to help him appear to be doing something about the current crisis and that he doesn’t actually think that this is really a workable solution. If he genuinely thinks that this is a workable idea he’s completely out of touch with reality.

As Mr. Wingate mentioned Spain, allow me to use Spain to show why his suggestion would never work.

As of 23 July, just days before the UK government reimposed quarantine restrictions on travelers from Spain, this is what Spain’s Covid-19 “heat map” looked like according to the BBC:

Under Mr. Wingate’s suggested course of action, the UK government would only have introduced restrictions on travelers arriving from Catalonia, Aragon, and the smaller nearby regions. Travelers returning from Madrid and all regions south would have been free to return to the UK without having to quarantine for 14 days.

At first glance (and if you don’t give it any thought at all) that may seem fair, but does any right-thinking person actually think that when British visitors in Catalonia (Barcelona) find out that they have to self-isolate for 14 days if they return home from where they are, that they won’t simply travel south to a region with a lower infection rate and then travel back to the UK from there?

There are next to no barriers to travel within Spain (see here) and there is no need to show ID when traveling within the country. That means that there would be no way for the UK government to track who had been staying in an infected area and who had not…so what’s the point of imposing any sort of quarantine rules at all?

All you have to do it to take a look at the thousands upon thousands of people in the UK who are happy to put all thoughts of social-distancing to one side if it means they can lie out in the sun, to understand that there are a lot of people in the country who don’t really care about what’s going on all around us (take a look a the image on this page if you feel you need some proof). These are the same people who would visit Spain and who would be only too happy to find any way possible to avoid having to self-isolate if they were given even half a chance.

Bottom Line

I’m far from being a fan of the current UK government but I have absolutely no issue with how it has reimposed quarantine restrictions on travelers arriving from countries that are seeing spikes in infection rates. It was a colossal mistake not to lock down the country’s borders back in March, but at least officials are now trying to make up for it by limiting the risks from countries where Covid-19 is on the rise once again.

The idea that the UK government should only be imposing quarantine rules on travelers from specific areas of certain countries is ridiculous. It’s an idea that doesn’t take into consideration human nature nor does it take into account just how easy it would be for people to circumvent that kind of policy.  None of us are going to get back to normality until we get this virus under control and we’re not going to get it under control by allowing everyone and anyone through the borders regardless of where they’ve been and who they’ve been in contact with.

I appreciate that this may be inconvenient for the travel industry but, to be blunt, I really couldn’t care less.