To think the U.K. should have just shut the boarders in March

[Lardlizard]

Surely that would have saved the country millions

How though? Most of our goods get trucked in from Europe.

I think Australia and New Zealand have gone down the wrong path. For us the virus is now endemic so a vaccine that provides a 90% reduction in spread is great news.

Whereas when they open up even with a vaccine they'll have problems, especially as it's not given to under 18s.

I can understand repatriations (followed by quarantine.)
As I can understand humanitarian efforts.

It's the blasé attitude that to do anything is far too much effort and undesirable as it causes that scary "economic friction".

No point arguing about "human rights" now - we could be more or less locked down until vaccinated, which could be another year for some of us. In the meantime the economy will suffer even more, people will be denied hospital treatment, and some will be afraid to risk meeting family members even over Christmas, so where are "human rights" in that scenario? You could see this virus coming in January. We have a useless government that refused to act quickly and decisively at the start. Closing borders to everything bar freight and setting up supervised quarantine hotels for the inevitable "exceptions" would have been prudent. Prudence isn't on this government's agenda.

Just for comparison, I'm flying to Spain at the beginning of next week and I had to start the process of preparing for that, 2 days ago.

I need a negative PCR with a special identity confirmation on the test result, which meant going to a specific test center that scanned my passport and linked my test to that.

I need to fill in a form and have that, plus my test result, ready for when I check in at the airport. Check in is compulsory for everyone because here (Germany) you must now put all your luggage in the hold - small hand-luggage suitcases included, so security control can run smoothly, and less people will get up during the flight to access their baggage. Small rucksack and that's it.

Said form will create a QR code that I will scan before exiting the airport after landing in Spain. I will also have my temperature taken, and the medical staff at the airport do a quick visual test to check you're not ill.

Similar procedure coming back to Germany, except that you must quarantine for 5 days first before you can get a test and be released from isolation. Oh, and they check you're in the house whilst you're doing your isolation. They have people who actually check those forms and call/email you regularly.

That's how these countries aren't getting many cases from overseas, because they have procedures in place to minimise imported cases.

Meanwhile small, local businesses are required to be covid secure .. before being told to shut anyway.

In hindsight, we should have closed our borders. Remember though, we did not know very much at that stage and people would have been in uproar if we had closed our borders to all countries. I think that we should have refused flights from China and Italy though and then, as the virus ravaged other countries, not allowed flights to and from there.

It's a difficult call and no-one anticipated what this virus could do. Decisions were probably based on Sars and Mers which never lived up to the drastic warnings about them.

It's not about shutting the borders (although I guess from 1st of January, the UK can do as they please).

It's about having proper measures in place to minimise the amount of imported cases that arrive in the country and are left to freely mix with anyone they want from day 1.

@DailyPotion

What do people mean by "close the borders"?

Didn't we want any imported food or medicines with their foreign lorry drivers, for example? Visiting engineers,doctors, fruit pickers?

NZ and Australia have had all of this - just with lower numbers coming through the border, all controlled, so that they can make best use of internal quarantine measures. NZ and Australia import a huge volume of food and goods. They made it work.

We should have done one big lockdown in March, closed the border, then opened with regional measures whenever rates rose. If we weren't going to do that, lockdown was always going to be repeated on a national level, to greatest possible economic destruction.

Allowing people to travel for ski trips was fucking ridiculous.

@SionnachRua - I don't disagree - Ireland certainly should have done that - but can't see how either of our countries can decide to unilaterally shut the border tbh. Joint decision to close would have been best.

I agree. The island should have been shut down. But there was no way Arlene would agree to anything that suggested cooperation with the south.

An all-island approach, that our government and most of the Northern parties (bar the DUP) would have approved, would have made a massive difference. Arlene was way too busy making sure everyone knows she's British to do what was best for NI.

Hindsight or no - govt repeated the mistake in summer (ie no system for checking and enforcing quarantine - as Eileen says). Instead of cautiously testing and monitoring a policy of allowing flights in and looking at the rate of infections, they had a free-for-all saying that it was essential for tourism etc.

I completely agree and thought this at the time. Can you imagine how this would have been portrayed by the media though? ‘Xenophobic right wing Brexit Tories shut the borders and blame Covid on foreigners’.

The WHO to my mind have been acting as a fog rather than a beacon of light throughout this.

Australia is nowhere near as dependent on visiting lorry drivers or migrant labour, surely, just because of practical issues with its location.

Besides which, isn't it too soon to be considering Australia such a success? It's summer there now, they are seeing hot spots again already and it's what happens in flu season that counts.

@Raspberry681
completely agree and thought this at the time. Can you imagine how this would have been portrayed by the media though? ‘Xenophobic right wing Brexit Tories shut the borders and blame Covid on foreigners’.

The print media is 75% Tory. Even the BBC takes most of its headlines from the right wing press before just shaving off a few of the sharper edges. The media has given this government an unbelievably easy ride given the “world beating” shit show they’ve put on for us. There’s no such thing as a Tory government “getting hell” from the British press - it simply doesn’t exist as a concept.

People who are saying oh well I think we handled it quite well. Now vaccine is here we can vaccinate. But we took a chance that there would actually be a vaccine to save us. Imagine if there hadn’t been one for 5 or 10 years

If we had stopped people coming into the country on March 1 it would have saved a huge number of lives in Spring. But it would have been politically impossible. Would you have accepted it? And the borders would still have to be shut now.

This government has turned the UK into a laughing stock , but the biggest fools are the selfish idiots who voted for them
They really have shafted us , our children & the next generation

Yes but they wouldn’t have to be shut shut. Just managed better with only essential reason for travel and quarantines in place. I think they thought they would save the tourism industry by keeping them open. But that hasn’t worked anyway

Again no one seems to want to admit that keeping the borders open was in line with expert advice from the WHO at the time. It obviously all looks different in hindsight but closing all borders in January would have looked crazy. New Zealand's biggest advantage was timing - they did it very early in their own curve but by then there were plenty of other examples (e.g. Italy) to make it look like a viable decision, though there was still a lot of disbelief at such a harsh measure at the time.

I know that there were some MN threads about closing borders back in January and that those posters are very pleased with themselves, but actually I'd still rather the government followed WHO advice than MN's most pessimistic doom mongers even if they occasionally turn out, like a stopped clock, to be right.

I know of drivers where everything has moved to no contact this year it's certainly driven new working practices.

It's the taxi drivers and bus drivers who came off very badly in this. Migrant labour was an obvious issue for the public health to deal with. People heading off on airplanes and airport mass transit (or to annual business networking dinners ) are a bit less easy to justify imo.

Australia is nowhere near as dependent on visiting lorry drivers or migrant labour, surely, just because of practical issues with its location.

It's reliant on shipped and air freight - all of which involve people intensive transport, unloading (and reloading of outbound goods). So the border is a bit leaky, sure - but they are leaks which can be mopped up with test and trace and with regional measures if there is an outbreak. Much unlike our completely uncontrollable open borders deluge.

How though? Most of our goods get trucked in from Europe.

A lot of our goods arrive by sea, road or rail and then get distributed internally.

It's true that a good chunk are just driven straight to wherever by European drivers but they don't really have much contact with locals because they are on short turn-arounds.

Even if you ignored the truckers you'd get a good drop in transmission from the other measures but it's easy to place H and S restrictions on foreign drivers backed by big fines. We already have systems for checking other stuff so it doesn't even need much extra bureaucracy.

Returning UK drivers are probably the biggest source of risk but, again, additional H and S rules when abroad can help.

It's not possible to stop all inbound transmission of Covid 19. It's about getting numbers low and being able to trace where cases do break out

We also need a fit for purpose quarantine system for travelers arriving in the country. Not the unenforceable, not fit for purpose system we have currently.
If it's done in hotels, it has the bonus of keeping some of the hospitality industry going.
If nothing else, England has shown we are not good at self regulation for the greater good.

It would have had have been very early February or earlier when very few countries if any were

Lorries daily is a big issue

Having said that I like to see best guess from people with with insight on what would have happened if we had and where we’d be

Yep. They should have shut the borders very early on and therefore we probably wouldn't have needed lockdown. The furlough money could have been given to airlines.