Quarantine

We are less than a month away from entering 2022 — so why does it feel like March 2020 all over again? Cable news networks are obsessively covering the new Omicron variant of Covid-19. They are hellbent on scaring the daylights out of any unsuspecting viewer who accidentally flips onto their programs. To be fair, the media is taking cues from the president. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is reportedly weighing up a seven-day self-quarantine for all travelers arriving on our shores, regardless of vaccination status, including US citizens and permanent residents. Travel bans, which fell out of fashion in the Trump years because they were "xenophobic", are suddenly back in vogue. It all begs the question: didn’t Joe Biden promise to shut down the virus?

Do vaccines lead to freedom – or to more lockdown rules? That very question would have seemed bizarre a few weeks ago, when Matt Hancock told this magazine that he’d ‘cry freedom’ when the most vulnerable had been protected. But now, things are swinging the other way. The end of the second wave in Britain (infections and intensive care admissions are down 95 per cent from the peak) has not been followed by reopening. Instead, it’s being used as rationale to continue lockdown for months to come. The latest is international travel: the freedom to leave the country.

The search for the right balance on border policy continues, as Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced this afternoon a host of new measures that travellers coming to the UK will face. From Monday, all arrivals will need to take two PCR tests: one on day two and another on day eight of self-isolation. This will apply to everyone, regardless of where they are travelling in from or whether they are quarantining in a hotel or in their home. This means anyone arriving in the UK will now be taking a total of three Covid-19 tests, as a negative test within 72 hours of travel is also required.

Who would have thought, this time last year, that the British government would be planning to detain British nationals at the airport and keep them under guard in a hotel room for a ten-day quarantine? It’s quite a departure for a country whose values have always been defined by the defence of liberty. But we’re living in exceptional times, with the Covid death count at more than 100,000 — a bigger hit, as a proportion of population, than almost anywhere else in the world. This requires deep reflection about the mistakes made and the changes needed. When the sick are still dying — at a rate of more than 1,000 a day — it’s hard to have a calm political discussion about what went wrong and how to get it right now.

From Monday, the guidance for self-isolation is changing. Previously if you were told by officials (or the NHS app) you had been in close contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19, you were expected to self-isolate for 14 days. Starting next week, this will be reduced to 10 days, and will also apply to those returning from 'high risk' travel areas that are not on the UK's 'green list'. The update was issued as a joint statement from the UK chief medical officers, who said: 'after reviewing the evidence, we are now confident that we can reduce the number of days that contacts self-isolate from 14 days to 10.' This brings the quarantine period for close contacts in line with those who test positive for Covid-19.

I’ve always thought the ‘last flight out’ was reserved for truly grave situations abroad – or an apocalypse film starring Will Smith or Brad Pitt. Yet somehow I unknowingly found myself on one – or one of the last – yesterday, flying from Malaga back to Heathrow Airport. I can’t say the re-instated quarantine rules for Spain came as a total shock. As the number of Covid cases started to surge in Catalonia predominately, but along the coast as well, I’d been keeping tabs on the local press. I didn’t follow along too closely – partially because it was out of my hands but also because The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is very hard to put down.

The government’s most unpopular policy on its own benches is its plan to make almost everyone arriving in this country quarantine for 14 days. Among backbenchers and the outer cabinet this policy is disliked with an increasing intensity. ‘Colleagues absolutely hate it’, one cabinet minister tells me. Some backbenchers dislike it because it will hit their own constituencies particularly hard – airlines and airports will lay off more staff because of it. Others dislike the ‘Britain is closed for business’ message it sends out. While for a growing number of ministers it has become a focus of their resentment at how policy is made with their minimal involvement – cabinet committees are meeting far less frequently than they did.