Coronavirus: Why UK quarantine plan leaves Scotland exposed

From Monday, all international arrivals into Scotland will be required to isolate for 10 days under supervision in Government-appointed hotels, but as the Herald reported only eight per cent (19 out of 247) of the passenger flights landing at Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen Airports next week actually are international.

The vast majority are flights coming from elsewhere in the UK or the Common Travel Area (CTA) of Ireland, Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands.

READ MORE: Hotel quarantine will cover just 8% of flights into Scotland

As things stand there would be nothing to prevent someone flying into London Heathrow from the US (currently reporting 349 cases a day for every million people, compared to around 160 per million in Scotland), hopping straight on a connection to Edinburgh, walking straight out of the terminal and catching a bus into Scotland’s capital.

That is not to say there are no checks: arrivals must provide evidence of a negative Covid test and home quarantine will still be required for anyone flying from non-red list countries.

The problem is, people can be incubating the virus and test negative, and compliance with voluntary quarantine has been poorly policed, with fewer than one in four people ever telephoned by contact tracers to remind them to stay at home.

The Scottish Government wants the UK Government to adopt its blanket approach to hotel quarantine for all international arrivals, in line with templates successfully set in New Zealand and Australia.

Failing this, it asks the UK Government to quarantine all international arrivals in England before they travel on to Scotland, but no agreement has been reached - and cooperation appears unlikely.

The UK Government is currently limiting hotel quarantine to 33 ‘red list’ countries - mainly covering South America and parts of southern Africa - which are considered high risk for importing the Brazilian and South African variants.

With the exceptions of Portugal, Dubai, and Cape Verde they are mostly unlikely to be popular destinations for the average British holidaymaker (Eswatini, Burundi, Ecuador?).

Anyone arriving into Britain from any of these countries would be quarantined in a hotel prior to onward travel to Scotland, but these are small numbers: there were just 130 travellers matching that criteria last week and it will dip as the £1,750 hotel quarantine bill bites.

READ MORE: Sturgeon warns Scots not to book holidays abroad

Meanwhile, however, some 35 other countries where the highly-infectious South African and Brazilian variants have also been detected are missing from the list: among them Austria, Denmark, France, Greece, Japan, Kenya, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada and the United States.

Scientists have branded the discrepancy “not good enough”, adding that the virus “spreads like wildfire”.

There is also the problem that most countries have nothing like the UK’s world-leading genomic sequencing capacity, therefore mutant strains are likely to be evolving and spreading in their populations long before any threat is discovered.

Even in the UK, the highly transmissible Kent variant - now responsible for three quarters of cases in Scotland - is believed to have first evolved in a patient in September, but was only identified as a danger in December when public health officials noticed a puzzling explosion in cases in South-East England despite lockdown restrictions.

Under the UK scheme, passengers arriving from the US - where prevalence of the virus is higher than the UK - will not have to quarantine in hotels; while in Scotland passengers arriving from Norway and Finland will

The UK Government’s approach is a compromise which pleases no one - certainly not public health scientists and epidemiologists, but not even the travel industry - and is ultimately likely to do more harm than good (as the second wave demonstrates) by somehow trying to balance overseas travel with managing a highly contagious viral epidemic.

The caveat is that, right now, international travel is not our biggest hazard; but it will be, if we are not careful.

Many of the international arrivals flying direct into Scotland next week are coming from countries (Norway, Finland, Turkey and Poland) where prevalence is already lower than it is in Scotland, and in any case, non-essential travel is banned and people remain much more at risk of catching the virus from infected people within their own community.

Source: Public Health Scotland

Scotland is currently averaging 830 new positive cases a day - 5,810 per week.

In comparison, in the week ending February 7, a total of 4,625 people arrived in Scotland from outside the UK (both directly or via ports in England and Wales first): some of them may be incubating the virus, but the vast majority will not be.

The real problem with quarantine loopholes will come in the months ahead when Scotland - hopefully - returns to the low levels of around eight cases per day that we were recording in early July last year.

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Based on the first wave, we would be unlikely to reach that point until April, but that - more than any other time - is when the UK Government should follow Scotland’s lead and ensure that imported cases are kept to an absolute minimum.

There is a false perception that quarantine is a measure, like other lockdown restrictions, to be eased when prevalence falls. It is the opposite: when virus rates are at their lowest, strict quarantine is at its most effective.

Cases have fallen steadily to an average of 830 a day, but were averaging eight per day in early July

The same is true for other travel curbs, such as movement between England and Scotland. Genomic research shows that 40% of the new strains imported into Scotland last summer came from abroad, the rest from elsewhere in the UK.

By delaying foreign holidays at least until summer, if not later, the payback is a vaccination programme completed without being derailed by imported variants, and a domestic economy of schools and hospitality able to achieve something much closer to normality.