UK arrivals face hotel quarantine to stop mutant variant spread
Ministers have been asked to draw up plans to strengthen Britain’s borders, to stop new variants of coronavirus undermining the vaccination effort.
Officials have been told to prepare for the creation of quarantine hotels for those arrived in Britain, and to use GPS and facial-recognition technology to check that people are staying in isolation, the Sunday Times reported.
SAGE advisor professor John Edmunds told Times Radio he welcomed the idea.
“If you’re going to have quarantine then you should probably make it as effective as you possibly can. Ours has been rather lax, not just for visitors coming into the UK the vast majority of whom do not have Covid, but we’ve also been rather lax with our quarantine of individuals who have been in direct contact with a case; indigenous cases.
“We’ve been pretty lax about that. We just ask them to stay at home and so I think yes, if we’re going to have quarantine we should try and make it work as best as possible.”
On Friday Prime Minister Boris Johnson scrapped all travel corridors with the UK for the next four weeks, as of 4am on Monday morning.
Travellers arriving into any of the UK’s four nations must now provide a negative test pre-departure, followed by a second test after self-isolating for five days.
Those who flout quarantine rules will “face substantial fines for refusing to comply”, the PM announced.
The move followed the transport secretary yesterday banning all flights into the UK from South America and Portugal over concerns about a new Brazilian variant of coronavirus.
This morning foreign minister Dominic Raab told Sky News he hoped the government could consider easing lockdown restrictions by March, if it can meet its target for rolling out coronavirus vaccines.
The government hopes 14 million of the most vulnerable people will have had at least one dose of a vaccine by February 15.