UK to require negative Covid test before entry
 

After the best part of a year faffing about and generally allowing Covid to run riot through the country the UK government has decided to require a negative Covid test in the 72 hours before departure for the UK for all travellers - including UK citizens. Also, unless coming from designated countries, those people arriving will have to isolate - the stupidity continues though as unlike most other countries to get to where you are going to isolate you can travel by public transport. I just cannot understand how we have had such a hard hit from Covid compared to other islands like Australia (909), Ireland (2,307) and New Zealand (25).


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55582116

Should of been done at the beginning. My wife works at the airport and it's a disgrace....people coming into the UK transiting to other countries and being allowed to travel on public transport to other airports . Should just shut the airspace full stop . You wouldnt believe the amount of uk citizens coming back making bullsxxx excuses about why they were abroad and having no intention of self isolating .........:ban:

It's not just a UK thing. Where I live, three local city councillors have admitted that they travelled overseas to visit family, knowing full well that non-essential travel is strongly discouraged (but still allowed). One hopped over to Seattle, one went to a wedding (!) in Mexico, and one went to visit family in Somalia.

I cancelled my plans to travel to visit my parents at Christmas. Most people seem to take the right actions, but a small handful of folks seem to think they are better than the rest of us.

There are no legal consequences - I just hope that voters remember these actions during the next election.

Same is now happening for Canada. All air passengers must have a negative Covid-19 test before even being allowed on board. But the way it's written it doesn't seem to apply to the land border. So anyone can still fly to a border city and cross on foot or by car without the test ...as long as they're Canadian residents/citizens or otherwise allowed to cross through a variety of existing exempt categories such as commerce. 14 day quarantine still applies.

Turning that in its head no citizen should think thet have the right to go on holiday in the middle of a pandemic then stroll back in and totally ignore the rules to quarantine . This has been going on for months now and if u decide to travel and get caught out then dont expect to get back to ur own country .......I include foreign nationals who transit thru here as direct flights are banned .

Correct. A government does, however, have the right to enforce mandatory self-isolation (directly airport to isolation hotel) to prevent a pandemic.

Your right to go on holiday is not greater than someone else's right to not die.

Seems to me that while perhaps a government should not forbid their citizens from entering, they or an airline can certainly set requirements for carrying those citizens in an airplane. Similarly: bus, taxi, or train. Someone has to be able to say that you or I, with symptoms or in the absence of a negative test, can't board a plane.

Plus a government can, as stated above, enforce all sorts of rules once citizens (or others) are granted entry.

Mark

I agree with your premis, however, it was made pretty damn clear by most governments when the outbreak started to get the hell home - now.

Lots just didn’t think it would be a big deal, didn’t come back when told, and now are coming back. ALL of our Covid infections, including the new strain, are from returnee’s.

Though we are lucky living on an island.

There are calls here now to close the borders, which I fully support, provided they offer those OS some limited support.

:thumbup1:

Right.

This happened in the USA before. About 10 years ago, during one of the bad Ebola outbreaks in Africa, there was a big stir because some of the health workers returning to the US from working in the field didn't follow their quarantine. People were pissed.

................shu

Where'd you get that from?

The UK has been hard hit because its government have been woefully (criminally, in my view) incompetent at every stage of the process. They have reacted late and lite, given out false and contradictory information, paid out huge sums to their cronies for junk, ignored warnings and science, failed to implement proper lockdown protocols and ignored their own advice without consequence to the individuals concerned. In February 2020 when other countries were locking down and morgues were filling up, all our government was doing was telling us to wash our hands while singing God Save the Queen. I think that sums it up.

Even today their reaction to the threat from abroad has been half hearted. There are "safe corridors" to countries where infection rates are lower than ours. Arrivals are not checked or quarantined, and there are no follow-ups in any case. Business travellers face no restrictions on travel whatsoever. A few months ago you could perhaps argue that UK rates were so high it didn't matter much if a few more infected folk came in from abroad, however against that now there are new more infectious variants arising in RSA and BRA, and we don't need those as well as our home grown new more infectious one. Plus of course, one infected person on a plane can infect dozens of others, all sitting in a tube full of recycled farts for 2 hours.

If we were taking this seriously there should be not only test certs for passengers before boarding, there should be 2 weeks mandatory quarantine in commandeered hotels as well. But we still aren't.

I wish my mrs could do a live blog from the airport she works at , the public would have a fxxxing fit . It's a total farce and travellers are taking the Pxxs by flying via another country that isnt on the banned list having left one that is .It is unbelievable what goes on re the lack of enforcement at airports......contrast with the ports where people are stopped questioned fined and turned around !!

HAVE.
Should HAVE been done...

Well it now HAS been sorted :innocent:

Blimey, that was a bit harsh. There's hardly a sentence written here that doesn't have some kind of error. See what I mean. :rofl:

It's just the great vowel shift still shifting. :rolleyes2:

I read that it should have been done as in some time ago - like, say, nearly a year ago and to be fair I still cannot get my head around why the UK allowed people to travel in and out of the country freely without any real regard for where they have come, where they were going and whether they were able to or would isolate.

It really beggars belief the crass stupidity of the UK government and then I see that they are the same ones that insisted on pushing ahead with Brexit without any delay - and then I realised that they were in fact both crass and stupid.

Well it's nice to know that there are people reading posts and their response is to Shout grammatical corrections as opposed to storming buildings :welcome:

If you look at the top, first world ‘Covid’ performing countries - Australia, Japan, Germany and New Zealand are 3 of the best.
Each of those countries has a big export base - Australia is mined materials, Japan and Germany is manufactured goods and New Zealand is lamb.
The UK economy is based mainly on the service and financial industries which in tails, I imagine, lots of foreign travel.

Just my thoughts here but, I suspect, the people in charge (whoever they are) wanted to keep things going and the holiday makers just piggy backed on to this opportunity.

Think you are probably right . Hopefully you wont get a visit from PrinceHarley.......:innocent: Shame he doesnt practice what he preaches .

Used to be a travel forum.
Now a pro quarantine lock'emup forum.
Lockdowns masks and curfews never did much good did it?

Let's get our travelling spirit back asap.

Actually it worked very good here in Australia & that`s because we didn't take our foot off the brake until it was safe to do so by testing.

Problem with bumbling BoJo he`s always late taking action, and when he does its only a half arsed approach to the problem, he is more concerned about keeping the masses happy & business going (and taxes coming in), but its a failed economic approach.

What`s a human life worth? 91,470 to date, its shameful & what about the long term effects on people with the so called "Long Covid" its seems the generation between 20 & 30 are a bunch of selfish c**ts IMHO.

Mezo.

The virus doesn't travel. People do. Stop passing it on, the virus dies... pass it on, people die. Lockdown so far has been the only surefire way to stop people passing it on to each other. Your home country tried letting people use "common sense" and it experienced a death rate 10x worse than its neighbours who locked down. Your own king criticised the laissez-faire policy.

This will change as the vaccine is more widely deployed and we can get back to travelling safely and responsibly. The spirit is not dead, it's just being a grown-up staying home for a little while and preparing for the next trip.

+1:scooter:

Looking at the curves UK has nothing to teach anyone.
Noone knows exactly why Norway and Finnland was spared compared to Sweden. Perhaps Stockholm is more like London than Oslo.
But we are much better off than most countries practicing useless lockdowns, maskwearing and even curfews. We are currently at #22, better than UK, France, Italy, USA....
Australia with less than 1000 dead is an extreme example of over-reacting.
The negative effects of the actions taken are much worse than the virus, both for economy and public health.
According to FAO 250 million risk starvation with an additional 6.7 million children 2020 - not from the virus mind you, but from the stupid actions taken.
https://gho.unocha.org/global-trends...-make-it-worse
And that is only a small part of the problem.
So the sooner we open up, the better. It is up to the governments to provide adequate health care and protect the vulnerable. Never in history has anyone had the crazy idea to lock healthy people up in an epidemic. Nor was it in the WHO recommendations, until they lost their nerve in March last year. From October 2019:
https://www.who.int/influenza/public...ublication/en/

Now the only way out of the mess appears to be successful vaccination. Then BoJo can (and will) claim to have saved the queen's own country. And we can travel again, inch'allah.

So if lockdowns, maskwearing and curfews are "useless" what does work?

Vaccines are the obvious 'jam tomorrow' big one but they've only become available in the last month or so and will take at least another six months to get to everyone (or everyone who'll have it anyway). So what should we have been doing for the last year? Even now Sweden has far fewer restrictions than most other eurocountries, so explain to me why the bug has not been rampaging through the population. Population density perhaps? Anti social attitudes? Better health service? Less fat people than in the UK (or Spain/ France / Italy etc)? What's worked for you and failed miserably here?

You're optimistic, it will take all of 2021 to vaccinate the elderly & the vulnerable, then the over 50`s are next & finally the generation who think they are bulletproof.

And that`s before we have to deal with the "Anti-Vaxers" Sigh.

https://scontent.fbne6-1.fna.fbcdn.n...1d&oe=602FCEDD

Mezo.

There's a lot of smoke but not much fire from the anti-vaxers so far here, but that's because for the most part the vaccination programme hasn't got to them yet. It won't be long though - if they keep going at the present rate they'll have done all of the most vulnerable groups by mid Feb and be moving on to the slightly less vulnerable. Best guess is to be getting to somewhere around herd immunity levels of vaccinations by mid summer. That's for the UK, and it would seem, for once in our lives, we seem to be doing something ahead of the curve.

There's a lot of unknowns in that though and what percentage of people are going to actually refuse it at the point where the needle is heading for their arm is a guess. There's a lot of people saying they won't have it but that covers a whole load of individual reasons - playing politics, misguided, religious convictions, uncontactable, couldn't care less, terminally stupid, medically unable, needle phobic etc etc. As a nation (and further up the ladder, as a species) we don't need everyone to have it, just enough to stop it spreading. If it turns out that anti-vaxing is a real issue it'll be interesting to see what measures various countries bring in to 'encourage' compliance. It'll be 'educate' and persuade to start with before carrot gives way to stick. Who's going to use what stick though?

As soon as anti-vaxxers realise they can't go on holiday.......

Actually, I think that the UK can teach a lot of countries about Covid. Essentially the lesson is - don't follow the lead of the UK as the government here are made up of incompetent liars.

The obe area that we are leading in a good way is vaccine distribution - clearly the government's ministers have been kept away from that and the NHS have dealy with it directly.

Perhaps the people in Sweden are better at following advice than many of the idiots in the UK, America etc. However the fact that your king has criticized the approach says a lot.

Wow, just wow.

I willbear that in mind next bweek when I go to my father-in-law's funeral - yes, he died from Covid.

Actually, this is how pandemics are routinely sorted out. For instance in Eyam in Derbyshire during the Black Death they locked down the whole village to stop the spread in the local area - and it worked. Malta has isolation hospital dating back 200+ years that reduced the risk of the spread of disease. China has limited the spread of this pandemic pretty effectively by locking down. The counbtries that didn't lockdown are those that have really suffered - Johnson has been too slow to act every time and has preferred not to make decisions.

I can't really see the start of travel on anything like the scale we have done in the past for a good 15 months or more.

You're right there, anyway. My country's government has handled the pandemic among the worst in the world, succeeding in achieving not only one of the world's highest per-capita death rates but also among the worst economic slumps. This isn't because they have locked down, it's because they have consistently locked down late and lite after long spells complacently allowing mixing in public places, schools and workplaces. Our latest lockdown came on 4 January after watching a rapid increase in infections and doing nothing since September. When you don't have an effective test/trace/isolate system in place to control the virus at low levels your only weapon is to forcibly keep people apart, hopefully before it becomes a crisis.

You say "nobody knows" why Sweden has done worse than its neighbours, with all due respect sir, everybody knows. Voluntary measures do not work. Frankly I'd much rather have gone down the path of Australia and New Zealand, strict control of contact to reduce transmissions then trace and act on every case. Result, no national crisis, healthy economies and fewer dead. The UK is about to pass the milestone of 100,000 dead, our government has nothing to teach anybody but some of us can see how it could and should have done so much better.

Appalling
 

I actually find some of the comments posted by a member in Sweden to be both appalling and glib. I respect that person, but find his views objectionable. I am sorry that other members have had to respond so strongly, however, I agree with them. Indeed, I think it is a measure of their common sense and fairness that they have. I know people have strong opinions, but this is peoples lives and many have died and out of respect perhaps the fellow in Sweden should have moderated his opinions and be a bit more thoughtful before letting his unconsidered opinions and views get the better of him.
Be safe and be kind.

We also was one of the first to test wastewater (sewage) for covid way back in March, it took the UK a further six months to catch on to that & start testing their wastewater & by then it was to late.

Mezo.

Certainly that is the case in Australia.
And the requirement to have a test before boarding is going to fall into disrepute very quickly. A thousand people allowed into Australia for the tennis open tournament on the basis they all have tests and go straight into quarantine and several tested positive when they arrived. Several more positives since.

We have enough problems getting our own citizens in via hard hotel quarantine without causing Superspreader events without allowing a heap of entitled sports stars in.

As for lockdowns, we bailed from the US in March and arrived back in Oz two days before they raised the drawbridge. We jumped in our motorhome and headed bush and nearly a year later, having travelled in 4 states, we are living a perfectly normal life. No masks, no lockdown, no restrictions. Of course many have had lockdowns and mandatory masks but that was so the rest of us didn't have to.
No community transmission at the moment.

Think everyone has said something that is right . The trouble is over here that if things became super draconian , which is probably the way to go judging by some far eastern countries results , the population wouldnt do it.......one look at the papers proves that by the amount of parties , raves, weddings etc going on....even if only half are true . Unfortunately around 10 per cent of this country dont give a fxxk about anyone else except themselves pandemic or not and they will always be like that........that figure could go a bit either way but I've not had coffee yet .

If u really want ur blood boiled read the BBC s newsbeat article......why I'm breaking lockdown rules !! The first interviewee is a total wxxxer , he is exactly the sort of person that undermines any efforts made by others . But it's not just the UK, Bali appears to have plenty of foreigners who think that's it's ok to bribe in order to get round the immigration rules then do what ever they want eg blog how to do what they have done or in the case of the Russian guy ride a moped off a pier into the ocean......then whine when arrested and deported

Hold the press - due to the shock pandemic the UK Government has decided that pole coming from a selection of countries will have to isolate in quarantine hotels for 10 days. This doesn’t come into effect until 15 February though. Up to yesterday the UK Government hadn’t spoken to some of the large chains of hotels that could be block booked about anything at all - for instance Best Western have hotels in Australia amongst other places that have had months of experience that would be go to tap into but the UK “Government” hasn’t asked for their advice.

Only 11 months late Boris. Australia managed to get it in late pretty darn quick and look, they have less than 1,000 dead rather than the UK and our 100,000. Spooky co-incidence or what.

It's a blxxdy joke....sod the airlines we should've just said no one comes in . Our leader of the opposition hit the nail on the head....our schools are shut but our borders are open !! Never a truer word spoken imho .