UKH

Something about horses and stable doors come to mind. Not much detail at this stage but well overdue.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/25/new-quarantine-rules-expected...

Based on experience here in Oz there is quite a lot of planning involved and is quite resource intensive. My questions:

- will it  operate with weekly caps in arrivals to the UK? If so what will those caps be?

- who will provide security and what role if any for the police and army?

- what exemptions if any?

- will staff be able to work second jobs while working at these hotels?

- is the gov prepared for the inevitable fallout from people moaning about their rights bering infringed?

If Heathrow arrivals stay at 6k per day then that is 42k to house for up to 10 days each week which is a significant effort. There might also be a difference in how the UK approaches it given Covid is already widespread in the community unlike Aus/NZ.

That is a good point.  Unlike say NZ, there is a real risk of transmission from quarantine staff to residents.  That’s something of a legal liability it seems.

It worries me that we’re only going to apply this to inbound travellers from high risk counties for the new variants etc; given the low sequencing capacity in many countries something nasty could be spreading under the radar from a high risk country to one perceived as low risk, and we won’t know until it’s too late.  Much like how the UK’s first wave came from European ski resorts and not directly from China.

We’ll see what gets announced...  

I think the numbers still travelling make any universal hotel based quarantine an impossible task. In the four weeks over the Christmas period, I read that 35000 people had arrived from south Asia. The more recent scenes from Heathrow would suggest that high numbers are still flying.

I don't think the rightwing covid 'experts' would stand for it either, so I think we'll have our customary fudge of allowing as many people to fly in order to support the airlines while trumpeting some restricted quarantine arrangement.     (From the Independent: Also speaking on The World Tonight, Dr Clare Wenham, assistant professor of Global Health Policy at the LSE, said: “I fear trying to assuage the travel industry at the same time as trying to crack down on this virus leads to this sort of halfway house where you're not really doing either.)

Think they are looking at people travelling from a high risk country. Reckon five days in a hotel with lots of testing. Reckon low risk countries will be self quarantine and testing. 
It’s all about appearing to do the right thing until either: 1) vaccination programme effective enough to start lifting measures some time after Easter or 2) we can’t wait any longer (vaccines not effective enough/new strains/supply problems/anti Vaxxers) and need to find new ways of living with the virus (hopefully option 1 !!)

Seems like even with a well organised system it’s possible for the virus to escape.  

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/25/new-zealand-covid-case-appear...

Which is why other well organised systems are layered around MIQ so that leaks can be rapidly identified and mopped up.

What’s MIQ?

Managed isolation and quarantine.

Thanks.

What numbers could these systems deal with? At one end of the spectrum we had 145,000,000 passenger arrivals into the uk last year.  At the other end we have current levels. So a MIQ system ‘may’ be adequate for current levels but doubt anything could cope with even a moderate increase. Simply too much human error and human duckwittery. 

I guess it would depend on how many still find it essential to travel if they face quarantine and a big bill.

Here’s an issue that is being avoided by the govt (but I reckon Home Office will be having discussions in secret about): there could 35,000 asylum seekers arriving in the UK, from all over the world and often with health issues. The issue of quarantining arrivals is a total nightmare. 

OK so looks to be very limited in scope ie Brazil & Sth Africa....which already have bans in place?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/26/labour-attacks-half-baked-tar...

I find this figure absolutely staggering. What on earth do those 6k people think is so important that they need to fly for at the moment.  I can't think of a single reason that would convince me to get on a plan and fly internationally at the moment other than war or famine and (I may be wrong here) but I would imagine those 6k people aren't mostly escaping war and famine.

Does anyone know the figure for UK wide international arrivals?

im personally relieved to hear this as am planning to (finally) return home from Vietnam in a couple of months but would have had to change plans if the hotel quarantines had come in for all.

Now, whether the UK *should* introduce a blanket ban is another question entirely.

Yes, I can’t see it scaling well, but at this rate I can’t see foreign travel going up much this year; lessons learnt from what kicked off cases after the summer, new strains heading for vaccine evasion, the UK rife with a more transmissible variant that has a change we know is share with vaccine evading variants - bringing new such ones closer.

I was thinking more about risk reduction and travel.  MIQ before flying would prevent transmission events on the planes.   This would perhaps eliminate the most obvious cause of brand-new infections in MIQ, which are the ones most likely to walk out of the doors.  It does however put the quarantine facilities under the control of a different nation to the one who is accepting risk in taking the travellers in. 

I can see a niche business model in building an MIQ resort with individual houses and swimming pools, and high quality catering service to the residents - combine your MIQ period with your Holliday.  A house in the sun with a pool, a wide catering menu and high speed internet and big TVs.  I can see some people being prepared to pay through the nose for that...  Probably build it somewhere like Dubai.

And from BoJo

"Speaking in the Commons, Johnson said no one should be travelling except for a narrow range of reasons.

“I want to make clear that under the stay-at-home regulations it is illegal to leave home to travel abroad for leisure purposes and we will enforce this at ports and airports by asking people why they are leaving and instructing them to return home if they do not have a valid reason to travel,” he said"

What I don't get is if it is already illegal to leave the UK for a holiday why is he talking about maybe enforcing the law at some as yet undefined point in the future....the mind boggles!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/27/arrivals-in-uk-from-high-risk...

Perhaps nations will create pre-flight MIQs overseas? Each nation sets them up in a handful of feeder airports e.g. Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin for the UK and forces all travellers to use them.

Thailand have allowed people to play golf whilst in quarantine so they're doing a similar thing - people do their quarantine in a hotel with golf course.

Earlier in the pandemic one of my daughters had to fly into the U.K. from Canada.  She had been living there on a 2 year work visa but that had expired early 2020 and she had had to apply for extensions to her visa from Canada, trouble was those extensions prohibited work so she had to use savings to live on and then in October her health insurance expired and she could not renew it because it excluded Covid and she sensibly realised she needed cover for that.

Also BA cancelled 3 of her flights home without giving alternatives so by October she was living “on the bones of her arse” so to speak. We even had to drive down from Newcastle to pick her up from Heathrow because there were no regional flights available and quarantine rules meant she would have had to book into a hotel for 14 days in London which were closed anyway, our trip home had no stops and wasn’t the most enjoyable experience. 

That may not be relevant to today’s flyers but I suspect it will apply to some.