IN THE past few weeks, many holiday plans have been dashed after some parts of Europe, including the UK, reintroduced travel restrictions. Even UK transport secretary Grant Shapps had to cut short his holiday to Spain and follow it with two weeks鈥� home quarantine.
It is a stark change from June, when the UK government was encouraging people to holiday abroad to boost the travel industry. Since then, many countries have seen an increase in coronavirus cases, making going abroad more of a gamble. So what are the different options for managing the current risks from international travel, and which countries have got it right?
When the pandemic began, the World Health Organization initially discouraged travel bans, saying that they would worsen economic damage without slowing the virus鈥檚 spread. But some countries that adopted strict border controls, like New Zealand and Taiwan, have been among the most successful at controlling the coronavirus.
Advertisement
These countries haven鈥檛 stopped foreign trade, only leisure travel, with business travellers now meeting online. 鈥淭o the extent we were worried we were going to crash the world鈥檚 economy if we restricted travel, it doesn鈥檛 appear to have happened,鈥� says David Hunter at the University of Oxford.
However, foreign tourism is a large chunk of the economy in many places, so some foreign travel has restarted through 鈥渃orridors鈥�, where countries with a similar prevalence of coronavirus allow free movement between them.
Corridors are in place between the UK and countries including Italy and Germany. But this arrangement leaves little certainty, because coronavirus rates change. For instance, the UK last week took France, Malta and the Netherlands off its list of travel corridor countries. 鈥淚n the time between when people book a trip and when they come back, the circumstances may change,鈥� says Hunter.
Some in the travel industry have called for quarantine to be avoided by instead having health checks on arrival.
Indeed many airports, including some in the UK, check people鈥檚 temperature before or after flights to try to screen out those carrying the virus.
However, while fever is a common symptom of covid-19, .
Many places, such as Germany and France, are giving arrivals from high-risk countries a swab test for the virus 鈥� the same one that people get if they have symptoms. Some tests are fast enough that people can wait at the airport until they get the all-clear. Thailand has begun offering some travellers a 90-minute test so they can avoid quarantine and similarly rapid tests will soon be rolled out in the UK.
But many coronavirus tests have a high rate of false negatives 鈥� wrongly giving someone the all-clear 鈥� especially early on in the disease. A review of seven previous studies suggests that on the first day after infection, everyone tests negative, and even on day four, .
The safest approach is quarantine. In the UK, people have to stay at home for 14 days after arriving from abroad, unless they have come from an exempt country. Other places such as Australia, New Zealand and South Korea make people who are self-isolating stay in designated hotels to ensure they stick to the rules.
A breakdown in this strategy may explain why cases in the state of Victoria in Australia shot up. Most other Australian states have been using police to supervise quarantine facilities, but Victoria hired private contractors, some of whom caught the virus and passed it on, allegedly because of lapses in procedures.
There may be a way to make quarantine less onerous. Last month, Billy Quilty at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and his team released modelling work showing that the length of time for which people self-isolate could be cut to eight days, if they have a virus test on day seven and get the result the next day.
This would cut the number of infectious new arrivals by 94 per cent, compared with 99 per cent for a two-week quarantine, the team says. Such a strategy might be acceptable for many countries, but would be unlikely to satisfy those like New Zealand that are trying to eliminate the virus from their shores.
Even one week of quarantine may make short trips abroad seem unappealing for many. Hunter has argued that people should give up on vacations abroad this year and holiday in their home country instead. It might have been less disruptive if countries had settled for such a compromise in the first place.
