Did I say that working from home is a holiday??? I work from home, have done for 6 years, and work is work, however being furloughed is not "working from home" it is a holiday on 80% pay, albeit a very strange one. I was also furloughed for 5 weeks before returning to full paid employment.

The 5 weeks was a holiday of sorts, though obviously very much restricted as to what I could do, I made the best of it, but was very happy to return to work, it made me realise that despite my years, i'm not ready to give up just yet. There are some people, and I've heard then talking quite openly, who feel that furlough is wonderful and hope it never ends!

Seems Germany is getting close to putting the Balearics on a quarantine list for returning Germans after a surge of new cases. I wonder how many here will criticise that decision if and when it is made?

https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-n...eed-threshold/

At 50 cases per 100,000 people and 230 odd cases yesterday alone I would suggest, first, that the UK government decision was a good one, and second that Germany will put the Balearics onto the high risk list, as they did the Madrid area yesterday.

Frankly, I would suggest that for the UK holiday industry to continue drip dripping the restart of the season back by a few weeks at a time is probably not playing fair with would be travellers, who really ought now have their trips cancelled for the rest of the summer, and get refunded or rebooked. As it is the gullible will be booking trips in September / October that simply aren't going to happen.

Germany is blaming people returning from their holidays for their rise in cases. Meanwhile it is looking bad again for Spain and Greece is seeing a rise in cases. It seems that lessons have not be learnt about the dangers of travel and the virus.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53747852

Travel may not in itself be a danger. The danger is that once at their holiday destination a large majority of tourists let their guard down completely, particularly the young "healthy" brigade! I think the bars, discos and tourist burger joints pose a greater threat than the flights do.

To me it is very important as gives me a chance to get away from it all, good weather, good food but then again I have not had a day off since March.

Some have treated it as a holiday, some netflix binging, some more time with kids, there is no one size fits all.

WFH sounds great but having done it for considerable period of time years ago, not now, in truth I would hate going back to doing it full time. No social interaction at a personal level, zoom and teams are not it. Going forward try developing a team with new team members when they all live in same town and never work in the office together. Hell managing a team who work in same place is difficult enough, try do it remotely forever.

Weather has helped lockdown, furloughing because it has been bright and sunny, try it in October to March and see what it looks like.

Travel industry is dead for 2-3 yrs with a certain % of kids paranoid for ever more.

It was and remains an ill considered and pointless knee jerk reaction.

As predicted, France has been added to the quarantine list.

and the Netherlands, according to the BBC

Malta also on the list.

I'm assuming it covers Corsica too. That's a bummer since I was due to travel there in early September (booked long before the virus!)

any differences for Scotland /NI for these new destinations?

No differences for Scotland. The FM confirmed the same countries will be put on the quarantine list at the same time.

According to Sky News France, Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, Turks & Caicos and Aruba all now added to the UK's quarantine list. Changes come in to effect from 4am on Saturday morning.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavir...-list-12048768

Yes it covers Corsica as per below.

Thought that would be the case, thanks.

Anyone want to guess which countries are at risk of being taken off the good-to-travel list next Thursday ?
Cyprus ? Czech ? Denmark ? Iceland ? Poland ?

With quarantine now applying to so many countries in Europe, and the threat of more to be added at short notice, surely something needs to be done. The airlines & airports need to be more pro-active in finding solutions instead of waiting for the Government to act. Why can't the airlines, airports & tour companies get together (allowing for social distancing!) with Bungling Johnson's stooges and thrash out some workable scheme. Testing seems the key, so why not test say 3-4 days before travelling to the UK and then again on arrival. Hospitals on the continent use this method of two tests 4-5 apart before releasing patients. Granted it won't pick up every positive case but nor will 14 day quarantine. If nothing is done soon the aviation industry not just in the UK is going to collapse due to lack of bookings caused by quarantine uncertainty.

The airports/airlines have been pushing for testing but the UK government won't entertain the idea so far. The UK Government make the rules not the travel industry. I think their concern is that people who test positive on arrival may still be incubating the virus hence the 14 day quarantine period. I do wonder however if there is scope for a more targeted approach as Germany does e.g. targeting Aragon, Catalonia rather than the whole of Spain, coupled with testing and a shorter quarantine period if the evidence supports it.

[QUOTE=Playamar2;10860673]With quarantine now applying to so many countries in Europe, and the threat of more

The governments mistake was not introducing quarantine months earlier.

The airlines and airports are not helping themselves by not enforcing social distancing measures so I don't see why the Government should give them any slack. Airlines like Wizz and Ryanair don't give a monkeys about spreading the virus so long as they can achieve a full flight.

Wizz BS advert
https://i.imgur.com/pFw9Ke5.jpg

Wizz reality at Luton with double queuing and requiring passengers to be at the gate 40 minutes before departure.
https://i.imgur.com/itkaWdw.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/fwklUal.jpg

More Wizz BS showing plenty of empty seats.
https://i.imgur.com/r29UzFy.png

More reality from LTN with masks off when Wizz sell food and drinks to make money.
https://i.imgur.com/kv0Yy89.png

The Canary Islands Government have imposed a face mask requirement everywhere from today, across all of the Canary Islands. In the streets/on the beach in fact outside anywhere. Many restaurants are allowed outside tables only and masks are required except for the actual purpose of eating and drinking. Clearly worried about something, must be all those from the mainland arriving on unchecked internal flights maybe.
Not going to help trade in any shape or form sadly..

I normally respect your contributions but you have no grasp of reality in this case. Social distancing = cost. This cost is paid for by the airlines who will go bust if they can’t get bums on seats and fill aircraft. Why shouldn’t Wizz sell food on board for consumption when you can sit in a cafe or restaurant and eat with no mask on?

May I suggest those at risk or extremely worried isolate forever more and leave others to get on with their life and take the risk. This has been going on now for a good 10 months and we can’t playing the game that the government are playing.

Boris was too late to take any action which prompted a complete lock down and crippled industries. It is entirely on his shoulders.

Furthermore the concern at the start was the impact on the NHS. Well since then numerous hospitals have been built and staff recalled to assist where needed, and PPE apparently sourced (subject to differing opinions). Surely the concerns are alleviated a bit in this respect and therefore we can go on with our daily life albeit taking some precautions that don’t exist in the pre-Covid world even if they cannot apply 100% of the time?

In Madeira it is a requirement to wear masks everywhere except when eating
The island has no cases because everyone is tested on entry, for free My test was done at 1630 with the result texted to me at 0130 Was asked to stay in hotel until then
They have picked up a handful of positives in the last 3 months, these miscreants are housed in a government provided hotel, the island hoteliers agreed on a suitable venue which they provided
The airport has a capacity of 200 tests Per hour, It would be a major operation at Lhr but there are plenty of empty hotel available.
if Boris wants to be proactive he should send a government minister out here to learn the ropes

Latvia now requires all people arriving from the UK to spend 2 weeks in quarantine

And some will find this a ridiculous decision as I do about having to Quarantine coming back from the Canaries.So to be absolutely clear I am in quarantine not because I have arrived back from the Canaries but because I am now resident in what these people call a "an at-risk country" the UK.

ericsson16

I'm sorry to appear dim but I don't understand what you mean. I thought you said previously you had arrived in Scotland from the Canaries.

The way things are going quarantine will be widespread throughout the world.
A report on Business Traveller says that Airports Council International (ACI) World is calling on governments to consider replacing blanket quarantine requirements with “robust testing” programmes for travellers. In the UK that will probably fall on deaf ears.

This whole episode is ridiculous and I suspect will largely be ignored. Boris himself said we have had great success in a recent solo press conference when he delayed ice rinks nail bars and beauty salons from opening.
He stated we have the virus infection down to 1 in 1900 of the population
So do the maths, say it’s 2000, that divides into 100,000 at 50. In other words he himself knows we are equal or not worse than most of Europe, as our deaths total proves. So he then obscures the truth by announcing the opening of the above as Q is introduced for France Holland etc. Double talk

Walnut

As I was at pains to point out last week the European countries infection rate published daily is the 14 day cumulative number of new cases based upon those tested not on those within the whole population that are estimated to have the disease, that surveys such as that from the ONS calculate. Unless you can find data similar to the ONS research for all other European countries you simply cannot make that comparison. I'm not supporting the way that quarantine policy is applied - far from it - but the data has to be like-for-like to mean anything.

ECDC stats are out for today. It's already been mentioned in the press, but at 32.2 and 30.2 cases per 100,000 over the last 14 days respectively, Croatia and Czechia are on the 'at risk' list for quarantine of people arriving in the UK

Denmark is also at risk with 31.5 cases, but Denmark is already fairly strict about people arriving from the UK, so traffic between the UK and Denmark is already constrained

Coronavirus: Croatia, Greece and Turkey could join UK quarantine list amid spikes in COVID-19 cases

http://news.sky.com/story/coronaviru...cases-12050886

Looking at the Greek figures for daily new cases, which are now running at a higher level than they were during the "first wave" I would say there is no justification for keeping them off the list; and there is a general consensus that Erdogan and his henchmen are massaging the Turkish figures too.

It really is difficult to see how the air travel industry, and perhaps even more so, the tour operating industry is expected to survive Covid-19. The latter rely on the summer revenue to pay the winter bills and make them profits; now there is next to no revenue coming in, and it looks very likely that what revenue there would be in normal times during the winter season could also be decimated.

There are very few industries that I would like to be working in at the moment from a job security perspective, and travel and tourism is right down the bottom of that list, sadly.

"I'm sorry to appear dim" So am I.

I completely agree with you, but I guess there has to be some like-for-like comparison. Countries like the UK with a now robust and aggressive testing regimes are now finding the cases, but being penalised (perhaps the wrong word) as a result of such testing. Only Denmark is the only country in Europe with over 1m population has tested more people per head of population.

Lithuania now requires people travelling from the UK to go into quarantine for 14 days

From the BBC
The UK is hoping to bring in mass testing to help ease restrictions, the health secretary has said.

“This is a really, really important drive that we have across government," Matt Hancock told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

He said testing people regularly could allow measures such as quarantining for arrivals from high-risk countries to be lifted.

Hancock added that new technologies, such as faster tests, where results can come back in minutes, were being looked at, and the government was planning to ramp up testing for the remainder of the year..

Now why didn't somebody think of that before!! Better late than never if it materialises.

As usual the UK is two steps behind the Germans, and one step behind the Italians. Incidentally on Euronews this morning they have reported a number of positives arriving from Eastern European countries at Fiumicino already this week. Meanwhile the UK just lets people wander in, complete a questionnaire online that nobody reads, and ask them to do a quarantine that nobody polices. I think we can count ourselves very lucky that the UK doesn't have a new case rate double what we have at the moment.

Is this down to where the pax are coming from? It’s my observation on frequent travels there that Italy receives far more flights from Albania, former Yugoslavia and Ukraine than we do in the UK and they are more problem areas at the moment. The troublespot we have in common is Romania. On the other hand we seem to have much greater immigration than Italy from Central Europe, Poland and the Baltics which touchwood have managed the virus much better.

Already mentioned on the Southend thread (thanks to Barling Magna), but Norway now requires people arriving from the UK to go into quarantine

Croatia goes onto the naughty step and if travelling back to Scotland folk travelling back to Switzerland will have to quarantine.

But Portugal removed from Q requirements - launch the fleet! (From BBC)