France transit/quarantine requirements are unfair

[Prochainesortie]

I know 5 families currently in relatively Covid safe European families (Eg Germany, Poland etc) visiting their own families who will now have to quarantine due to transiting France for a few hours and using the Eurotunnel. They won’t stay the night in France just refuel once due to driving distances, they won’t exit the car in the eurotunnel. 1 is my cleaner and she is panicking about no income on return. She doesn’t have online shopping and her children won’t be allowed out of her small flat to exercise for 14 days! The only reason she drove was to be safer and avoid airports! I think the U.K. government is unreasonable given France is such a transit country. More notice should have been given and they need to relax the transit requirements urgently. I agree that spending the night in France might increase the risk but 1-2 refuel/stop should be allowed as long as masks/sanitiser etc are used. My cleaner is driving in a big car with another family, I told her to look into driving through Germany for longer/carrying some fuel if possible. Hopefully she will find a way to avoid the quarantine legally by not having to stop.

Some data suggests asymptomatic carriers can be infectious for longer than people who do develop symptoms.

Lweji
The nationally hired tracers are indeed an utter and complete waste of money.

The Local authority teams

• know their areas
• have the contacts already with places of worship and community groups
• have contacts in the nursing and care homes
• liaise on a daily basis with the hospitals and GPs

but Whitehall has deliberately cut them out of the system

In Liverpool they were able to deal with an outbreak by locking down TWO STREETS Whitehall wanted to lock down the whole city

@ListeningQuietly I know right.

You forgot to also mention that the billions was wasted due to Apple!

I know it wasn't just Apple, it was a number of companies who didn't agree with the way the government wanted to try and harvest other info from phones. Google also has some involvement. Cannot remember the full story but that's the gist.

canigo
You forgot to also mention that the billions was wasted due to Apple!
do NOT blame Apple and Google.
They were utterly in the right.
Blame the person who wanted to harvest our data Dominic Cummings

THe SD track and trace was awesome.
They contacted me about someone I had slept with about 3 years earlier and he couldn't remember if we'd worn a condom or not. Shows what he remembers, I didn't shag him because he was one of those fuckwits who don't test. Not even sure why he still had my number haha unless it was a weird look how many numbers I have thing.

Canigooutyet
Indeed.
The Local Public Health teams have the skills and training and expertise

• I believe they also deal with HIV cases which is a pretty devastating thing to have to go test for.

They should have been used from March onwards

I thought Google were in agreement with the government and a part of that deal was how they got a nhs deal?

Oh and at some point google have updated their privacy stuff. Unless you actively switched it off not only will your ads be targeted to you, the places are mapped on a world map. 91 fucking privacy things I had to change and opt out of. No idea where I found it, was messing around with the dashboard and stumbled across it as it's all seperate to those privacy settings.

They do deal with hiv cases and any infections. It's them that do the stuff for when an area has an outbreak of chicken pox, measles etc.

If the mates deal wasn't set up, then whatever minister it was wouldn't have had any reasons to bugger off to America to set up the original deal.

The whole thing is bonkers anyway. 2 of my children are currently in France with their grandparents in a very safe area (literally a handful of covid cases over the whole period and no spike etc). We live in one of the worse affected area in the UK (we're somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester, the town next to us are on local lockdown). They will have to quarantine when they come back and miss 1 week of school. At this stage I can't say I give a damn. It is what it is. But I can see how those rules will detrimentally impact people relying on manual jobs etc Boris is not trying to take sensible decisions, he's a clown just trying to take the odd 'tough' decision here and there to pretend he's doing something useful.

FFS the OP and the cleaner are not trying to break the rules, the rules are such that as long as certain conditions are followed, quarantine is not required.

It is there, in black and white, so stop with the sanctimonious shit and making up of rules. Life can't just stop, and people have a right to do things within the rules. Travel is allowed, maybe with conditions, but allowable all the same, stop with the shitty deciding if it is acceptable or not.

But as usual the government is sitting back pretty whilst the nation turns on each other.

Although I'm sure there was a poster a few months ago about her cleaner being unreasonable.

Cleaner had mentioned she wanted to go to possibly Poland to see her family and her boss was outraged that her money was paying for the trip. And that just before lockdown cleaner had said she was struggling a bit and op carried on paying her. So lots of how dare she use my money.

Not saying it's the same person.

Thanks everyone who provided helpful input. And those who just need to vent about the Covid situation, I do understand! I just spoke to my cleaner. To be clear she is currently in an exempt country aka Poland and she doesn’t need to quarantine if she chooses the right way to come home. She cleans in a primary school for 4 hours from 5am every morning and she can’t miss starting on time as the school relies on her. She might fly back from Poland tomorrow or Monday now and her brother will drive the car back (probably through Germany), they are part of the same household hence they travelled together in the first place. My cleaner always wanted to do the right thing and stick to the rules. She drove instead of flying to be safer- she just got unlucky with these arbitrary rules. I think the petrol pump pay at station in France during transit/go through Germany might be ok but she can’t take the risk because she isn’t good enough at English to do an appeal herself if she got fined and she is scared. She is a key worker who put herself out there in south east London during lockdown to clean for vulnerable and keyworker children and teachers. Strange how some people on these threads make false assumptions...

she just got unlucky with these arbitrary rules

The rules are there to keep us safe, and to try and keep the infection rate under control, not to inconvenience travellers.

The rules aren’t arbitrary. If she didn’t want to find herself in this situation she shouldn’t have gone abroad.

I hope she gets back safely and that she had a good break with her family.

So as far as I see it your cleaner is in Poland (currently a safe country) and wants to return to the UK which would normally mean crossing Germany (safe), some NL, (quarantine required) Belgium (quarantine required) and France (quarantine required). But is concerned that if she stops in NL, Belgium or France for fuel she will have to quarantine for 14 days.

So why doesn't she simply drive to Aachen in Germany, refuel and then it is only 180 miles or three hours to Calais which she can easily do on a full tank of fuel. I used to regularly drive from Koln to Bristol on a single tank of fuel in a VW Toureg.

I don't see the problem?

@friendsoftheearth- yes that is what the rules are meant to achieve. But it is my personal view that paying with a card at 1 petrol pump is less risky than passing through Heathrow tomorrow. So some people who were going to transit through the eurotunnel are going to fly now if they need to get back to work.

@1dayatatime- thank you I did speak to her about that but she has looked at the online form and is too scared to enter several quarantine countries and would rather not risk it. Her brother will take that route though and drive the car back.

Pro because people rarely just stop just for petrol, they go to the loo, they pick up snacks, they stop for drinks. I have done the French route myself more times than I can count and it is VERY tiring.
You can't compare an airport to a drive, because it will always depend on location and infection rate. The government can not pinpoint exact infection hot spots, and people move anyway. So the only safe way for the moment is to quarantine people from whole countries. As the tech improves so we will be able to refine the safety measures, but we are not there yet.

I am for one am glad about the arbitrary rules, and would much prefer a very energetic response than a sluggish one that causes a second wave in the UK in a few weeks. We are at war with covid, no time for niceties because too many lives depend on it.

My husband is French and hasn't seen his family since xmas. We decided not to go this year, however shitty that may be, because of the risk of quarantine. Not to sound heartless but she did know the risks.

The rules ARE arbitrary. I can go on holiday in England, by public transport, to a busy campsite / caravan park / resort and sit in busy beaches surrounded by people, drink in a busy pub, go to my local supermarket where, despite the rules, masks are rarely worn and not have to quarantine. But I am in France, I drove with no contact with anyone other than my family in my car. I arrived at my rural, isolated gite where the nearest human being is about a quarter mile away. Every few days I go to the local supermarket where you are supervised using hand sanitiser when you enter the store... if you don’t use the sanitiser and wear your mask you are not allowed in.

So I will be “quarantined” when I get back to England (but can return home by public transport and go to the shop for food) despite being far less likely to have covid than my (real) work colleague who has been to a holiday park on the south coast mixing with the people in several other caravans because that’s what they do every year, no social distancing etc (and pictures to prove it on Facebook).

I’m not complaining, I knew the risks, I booked and paid for my holiday last autumn and took the decision not to just flush £2.5k down the toilet. If travel to France was genuinely dangerous the FCO would have declared it a no go area a long time ago so that people could attempt to claim on insurance (although ours actually will not pay out on pandemics).

I don't really know why the government is insisting on self-isolation rather than strict lockdown rules (ie only leaving the house for essential activities like shopping once a week and being allowed to exercise alone once a day), unless you know you have been in contact with a case. I just got back before the quarantine last night (always our planned date of travel) but was aware I might have to do it if the rules changed; of course I was prepared to, but the rules are pretty draconian and I can't believe many people will self-isolate from other members of their family. Where I was in France was very rural, has fewer cases than where I live in London and I had the virus in March.

Those who really think the rules will improve health in the UK should read them

The rules are definitely arbitrary. And pointless. I mean in my case 2 of my children will be under quarantine when they're back later this month but myself, my husband and our 2 other children will not be... what's the point of that.

Well as a key worker she should have planned before leaving the country what would happen if quarantine rules where introduced as she knew she was due back at work.

My partner is a key worker. His mum lives abroad. We don’t know when we will next see her. It’s shit. But it’s life at the moment because we know the risks of quarantine being introduced and that we couldn’t risk it.