Coronavirus Impact on Air Travel

[davidjohnson6]

There is an argument to say that if you are following your normal daily/weekly routine, you are coming into contact with the same people and thus if you are infectious you will be spreading to the same people on Monday as on Friday - i.e. you have a limited potential audience for the bugs that you carry. Once you start travelling around, if you pick up the virus on Wednesday, and fly home on Saturday, your potential audience is much larger - one person in a hotel restaurant will come into contact with many more people than they would while working in an office, and each of those people will then fly home to their own (different) home town, which potentially raises the R number and the infection rate much faster. The purpose of the 14 day quarantine is to prevent long infection chains from starting

The Govt has 2 things to consider - a) the health of its citizens and b) ensure the economy doesn't collapse (unemployment in the USA has ballooned in the last 2 months to about 20%). People going to work ensures we keep an economy but it increases the health risk. People flying to Mallorca and spending a week paying a hotel and restaurants owned by non-Brits does very little for the UK economy - but sees Brits mixing with far more people than they would otherwise and thus also implies infection risks. At some point you need to decide how much risk you want to take for health and the economy, and balance that against the UK still being a free society. Difficult call to make..... if you're too generous and someone's grandma dies after a 2nd wave in November, you get blamed for being too lax; if you're too strict you get labelled as a misery-guts and quasi-Fascist. If the UK on 01-Feb had banned all international flights while Covid was still something just in China and therefore far away and of no consequence to most Brits, then UK society would have likely ended up rioting in the streets - but such a strategy might have been right. As with any pandemic (and this always happens in pandemics) when imposing new rules Govt gets criticised as the start for being too strict; at the end of a pandemic Govt gets criticised for having done too little too late when the pandemic started

It is deeply disappointing (for me included) that summer 2020 is pretty much cancelled - I was due to be on a beach in Spain over the late May bank holiday, and am due to be in Greece later this summer. That said, sunbathing on the beach is a privilege, not a human right. However, having dithered in February/March, the UK is having to work much harder to eradicate the disease from the UK general population.
Tourist importing countries like Spain have an economy that is heavily dependent on tourists from nothern Europe - hence their willingness to take more of a risk to save more of their economy. Tourist exporting countries like Denmark have decided they don't want British tourists.

Boris and Priti Patel are doing an absolutely terrible job at communicating the reasons for the strategy (politicians are meant to be good at talking to the voters) - but in terms of trying to reduce the number of cases per day, it's probably still the right thing to do. Ultimately it's all about retaining some sort of perception of the UK being a free society, while putting in enough difficulties with social interaction that people decide to just stay at home and mix with very few people over the next few months (and thus stop infection chains from occurring). If pubs can open but everyone has to sit at a separate table 2 metre apart, you can't talk to your friends and the whole experience is miserable so people don't bother going to the pub - we keep the image of a free society but the motivation of going to the pub (and thus increasing infection risk) is destroyed. Following the Cummings episode, there is a need for somebody who is held in greater respect by the population (e.g. Chris Whitty) to explain more clearly why the foreign-travel quarantine is needed