Oh ffs just shut the borders already

[Circumlocutious]

‘PM concerned by Brazilian variant’

Sure, the mutation may be insignificant. Sure, we might be able to quickly tweak the vaccines so that they still work against it, if it all. Or it might completely fuck everything up and we end up a strain that vaccine-resistant. If not the Brazilian one, then it could be another mutation that emerges somewhere in an intensive factory farm four months from now.

I think the world won’t learn this lesson - that near borderless travel and weak quarantine rules are not sensible in a pandemic - until it’s too late.

Oh... and students of course. You guys want to ban the (lucrative for universities) international students. Including the ones who were right in the middle of their courses. International athletes - no chance. Engineers or technical experts, no luck. Humanitarian aid -- stuff it. I guess one way to prioritise the world.

Still don't know if "shut the borders" would mean people from Northern Ireland would keep their usual full freedom to enter RoI & GB at any time they liked.

20 hours land bridge crossing from Ireland to/from UK, 150,000 journeys per year. What is the EU working time directive for the drivers? How far might the land-bridgers travel before they have to stop driving? I'm sure they only stop a little bit for meals, toilets, stretch legs, visit family, call home...

@lljkk

Oh... and students of course. You guys want to ban the (lucrative for universities) international students. Including the ones who were right in the middle of their courses. International athletes - no chance. Engineers or technical experts, no luck. Humanitarian aid -- stuff it. I guess one way to prioritise the world.

You do know that the Australian Open tennis tournament is currently taking place right? And yes, all players quarantined in a designated hotel in Australia, including Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams.

Please tell me why international university students are more important than the British school children bereft of an education.

Also totally agree OP. We should have done this from the outset.
How can schools be closed and my child (aged 7, so I'd need to be there too) cant meet one of their friends outside, but people can get on a fucking plane with hundreds of others?

Still don't know if "shut the borders" would mean people from Northern Ireland would keep their usual full freedom to enter RoI & GB at any time they liked.

No one presently has the freedom to access all areas.

Have a look how the internal border closures work in Australia. They've all mostly sucked it up for the national good.

I don't think too many people are choosing to holiday here at the moment and don't we have flights from SA banned already , likely same may happen wit Brazil

Some people are so adamant that it can’t be done. But anything can be done. We need to live differently in a pandemic and look at what our priorities are.

Closing the borders doesn't help when we rely on food and medicine imports.

But we could still close business and leisure travel

@marshmallowfluffy

Closing the borders doesn't help when we rely on food and medicine imports.

There is no reason for accompanied freight to be affected, as elsewhere.

Totally agree, op. The government is responsible for a lot of unnecessary deaths and suffering through its failure to close borders to all but freight. Should have happened a year ago.

It’s so sad. People were going on beach holidays to Spain/tenerife etc in the summer. It was totally unnecessary

From Friday negative covid test will be required prior to boarding a train, boat or plane bound for England.

Source: gov.uk site

I think it is more sensible than shutting the borders. The shutting the borders would have been appropriate at the very beginning of the pandemic.

Hopefully there isn’t too many false negatives on those tests

@donewithitalltodayandxmas

I don't think too many people are choosing to holiday here at the moment and don't we have flights from SA banned already , likely same may happen wit Brazil

We have banned direct flights from South Africa but not flights that transit via other airports such as Dubai and Doha. Passengers from SA are still coming in, just not on a direct flight.

Reading the data threads, there seem to be more incidence of false positive than false positive in NHS testing, but of course no idea if it is the same for the testing systems used in other countries.

Worth noting travel from South Africa to UK was suspended on 29th December. Source: entry. Another gov.uk page

Hopefully the gov will do the same as required should more variants appear.

The negative test to enter the country is better than doing nothing, but it really isn’t the solution to this. People testing are negative at the time of test but all that means is that they didn’t have sufficient virus in their nasal passages at that particular point in time to trigger the test to be positive. Doesn’t mean they aren’t incubating the virus, doesn’t mean they couldn’t be infectious by the time they take the flight. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll weed out a few cases and stop them flying in, but it’s not foolproof by any means.

I saw Matt Hancock interviewed on the news about this and he was asked why not ban flights from Brazil. He came out with some rambling, non specific answer. Why ? Just why ? They will probably end up stopping the flights but again a week too late. Again it will then become the fault of the British public for not complying rather than the fault of the government for a series of misguided or delayed decisions.

@testingtesting321

This is the point that is baffling to me - that we still haven’t grasped the dynamic natural of air travel. A) banning or restricting flights from just one country is useless - we knew that this time last year B) by the time a new strain has been verified it’s probably in your county / neighbouring countries already

True, but I really don't think there are many people travelling at all, and with the passenger locator form being compulsory, it is easy to check if they are isolating.

At any rate... Who would want to come to visit new variant lockdown Britain? 😅

@TheDogsMother I must say I don't quite get why the gov does not do a temporary suspension or quarantining while the new Brazil variant is analysed. Sounds like Japan has already started on the analysis so the data would be here in a couple of weeks if I understand the lead times correctly (virus has to be grown in cells to be analysed, growth takes 2 weeks?).

Yeah I didn't get his logic on that either. Yet again too little, too late.

@cardswapping Yes that would be a very good idea. Take swift action to stop flights, investigate then allow them to take place again. That said we don't seem to have a woeful record of checking on and enforcing people who have traveled to the UK to isolate.

There certainly were lots of people travelling internationally around Christmas. I hope it’s tailed off a bit now

@PutneyHill

I am really struggling to comprehend how a party that practically got elected on the back of the "control our borders" rhetoric are too bloody scared to do just that.

I wonder if they were trying to dispel that view of them. After all, in the early stages of the pandemic it was Nigel Farage who wss calling for borders to be shut while Trump actually did just that. Perhaps they were trying to distance themselves from the orangutan and the flack he was getting for doing so. Remember the WHO was saying that there was no need for it at the time.