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The transport secretary has revealed lower than one in 1,000 of the Covid infections recorded in England throughout December had been introduced in from overseas.
Grant Shapps instructed BBC’s Today present that the figures for final month confirmed “less than one-10th of one per cent of all infections are with people who travelled”.
He stated: “Now, they may have been infected here in any case. In many cases they will have been in countries with lower levels of coronavirus than we’ve had here.
“In terms of proportion of the total, it’s small.”
The second lockdown completed, and outbound leisure journey restarted, on 2 December. From 19 December, London and huge components of south east England had been positioned beneath “Tier 4” restrictions that didn’t allow vacation journeys.
London Heathrow, the busiest in Britain, dealt with 1.1 million passengers in December.
The transport secretary additionally stated that the UK Border Force had checked three million passenger locator varieties – “about a quarter of everybody who’s come in”.
Every traveller arriving within the UK should full certainly one of these varieties, which requires private particulars together with the situation the place they plan to quarantine – which is required from virtually all arrivals.
Mr Shapps added that Public Health England had checked up on “over a third of a million people” to make sure they had been self-isolating in accordance with quarantine guidelines – which presently require arrivals from virtually all nations to self-isolate for 10 days.
Based on Mr Shapps’s figures, The Independent calculates that beneath 3 per cent of arrivals to England since quarantine was launched in June 2020 have been checked upon by well being officers.
The revelations have led journey business figures to resume their name for an finish to the quarantine system for arrivals to the UK.
Paul Charles, chief government of the journey consultancy The PC Agency, stated: “The figures speak for themselves.
“International travel is bringing in hardly any cases from overseas and Border Force are checking only a minority of passengers for quarantine compliance.
“Yet recovery in the travel sector is being choked off by the wrong measures. Travel bans and quarantines aren’t the answer.
“Only world-class, regular testing is the solution to bringing down infections and enabling economic progress at the same time.”
Paul Goldstein, a wildlife photographer and co-owner of Kicheche Safari Lodges in Kenya, stated: “Quarantine has been a farce since inception. It has been neither marshalled nor monitored.”
“Negative testing was the answer, something Grant Shapps studiously ignored despite a very expensive facility at Heathrow.”
The transport secretary additionally instructed the BBC programme that UK’s new test-before-travel coverage had been delayed for 3 days “for practical purposes”.
Mr Shapps stated:“It was simply a matter of practicality. There are over 200 countries and territories in the world. They all are using different types of coronavirus test.
“We needed to check them all to be able to inform people which ones will be adequate to meet our very exacting standards.
“We didn’t want to end up with a crisis, with Brits stranded abroad unable to come home.”
The measures will now take impact for travellers arriving after 4am on Monday 18 January.
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