Originally Posted by
blubak
Hope you guys are doing ok over there,seems quite messy at the moment.
Do you wish your government had closed borders for longer or put other measures in place to try & stop it spreading or are the majority pretty ok with what the government has done so far?
Always good to get an opinion from somebody looking at us from the outside so to speak.
I rely on international air travel for work having done 130 flights as SLF between 2018-2019. I need it to return!
If you go back to the start of last year - we didn’t know what we were dealing with. Of course if you look at recent history with Ebola with a virus that isn’t as transmissible but incredibly deadly, people were rightly panicking. As a result, the virus is deadly probably in 1 in 150 cases. Out of 75k deaths in the U.K., only around 4000 were under 60, and the odds decrease further if you don’t have any underlying health problems. We also have capacity for 500k tests every day and yet today we still have 60k cases and statistically 1 in 50 have the virus right now... but on the other hand 49 in 50 don’t have it.
The day the US closed its border to Europe, I was being pulled out of Istanbul being there for work reasons.
Politicians and the public at large think everyone gets on the plane to go on holiday - people need it for work, to see family as well. To do a total shutdown of international aviation makes it very difficult for those who have genuine travel reasons. We have a long list of quarantine exemptions of which I have used the airline one for certain occupations.
The best way is to have a solid testing regime both at the departure and arrival location. If you test negative twice, perhaps 5-6 days apart, that should be a ticket to freedom, not to spend another 14 days in a hotel room. I think the UAE has now struck the correct balance.
To shut a country down with no exit plan for the sake of a handful of cases I find a bit ludicrous. It has to be cost / benefit.
For the Australian government to say the vaccine isn’t going to be qualifying for a quarantine exemption, I find that quite incredible - because you will never reopen otherwise. The England CMO today has said restrictions vaccine or not could remain until next winter 2021-22 as this becomes a background seasonal disease but with a manageable risk. The purpose of the Oxford vaccine was to prevent serious disease, not complete eradication.