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If we're being forced into quarantine, at least show us the data to prove it's working

 - Getty
- Getty
LOGO: Test4Travel
LOGO: Test4Travel

The UK Government won't release figures on whether its confounding quarantine laws are even of use

The general public adhered to Covid guidelines to a level that astonished the Government. That happened for three reasons: clarity, evidence, and fairness. The rules were clear; the evidence was based on publicly available data; and everyone followed the same rules.

People only strayed when the advice became confusing ('work from home, go to work, stay alert') and when Dominic Cummings made it OK to ignore the rules, so long as you could justify it to yourself.

This is now happening with quarantine, which means it isn’t working.

Firstly, it’s confusing. Local lockdowns in the UK show that a national infection rate is not the ultimate measure, while the benchmark for quarantine from abroad (20 cases per 100,000 people) is actually lower than in some parts of Britain. Wales has tried to refine their system (with quarantine for some Greek islands, but not others), but the problem is the system itself.

In the meantime, holidaymakers are doing their best to muddle through, and finding ways to rationalise their choices. Three weeks ago, an acquaintance of mine flew to Ibiza after it had been put into quarantine. She had paid for her holiday in advance and would have lost her money if she hadn’t gone. A week after she returned, I spotted her in the pub, and I asked why she hadn’t followed the quarantine guidelines.

“Ibiza had lower rates than London,” she said, “The night-clubs were closed, and bars were more robust on masks and behaviour than anywhere in the UK. I was with my 'bubble' from home, and I spent all my time outdoors. I was safer there than I was in England and, when I returned, I went straight home and got a postal self-test. I didn’t leave the house until I got the negative result.”

Whether or not you agree with her behaviour, the upshot is that people are not fully adhering to the quarantine rules. Many will not be as diligent as she was and will just carry on as normal, whether or not they self-test. And, as the Telegraph reported last week, only three people have been fined for breaking quarantine, so we know that the system is not being enforced.

That leads onto fairness. People see others get away with it, and are tempted to break the rules themselves, particularly when they are going to lose out financially either way. Airlines must up their game, too: at the moment, you pay extra to reserve a seat in advance, which discourages some people from sitting next to the rest of their household – this seems farcical given the other rules we are asked to follow.

Data is the final problem. The Government has not released data about infection rates of returnees from quarantined countries. This data would either discourage people from travelling, or show that quarantine is unjustified.

The difficulty is that we can’t know for sure, because, if someone gets tested a few days after returning, we can’t tell if they contracted Covid-19 abroad, on the plane, or back at home. Track-and-trace has its issues, too, as the Tui flight from Zante, showed.

Testing-on-arrival is the only system that catches all these problems, which are public health issues, rather than economic ones. The infrastructure will take time and money to set up. But it’s the only viable solution to keep us all safe. The Government has done more to save jobs and lives elsewhere. They should do so here, too.