Boris Johnson’s latest review of travel restrictions has been blasted as a “missed opportunity” by the aviation industry, after ministers cleared the way for thousands of British families to visit France quarantine-free this summer but moved only a handful of countries onto the lowest risk category. Airlines meanwhile lamented the decision not to ease requirements for expensive PCR coronavirus tests for arrivals in the UK, which has been condemned as a “£100-a-head tax on flights” by the industry. Ministers were accused of “flip-flopping” on France after reversing their decision last month – branded “nonsensical” by one Conservative MP – to place the whole country in its own “amber-plus” category of heightened restrictions because of a spike in cases of the Beta variant of Covid-19 in faraway island territories La Reunion and Mayotte.
Reunion Island is also expected to go into lockdown during the weekend due to the surge in Covid-19 cases. The cases have been increasing in all of France outside territories as vaccination uptake is going very slowly. Prefect Jacques Billant stated that the situation as ‘worrying’ as there was an unexpected ‘unprecedented exponential growth of the epidemic’ with 350 out of every 100,000 inhabitants infected.
However French European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune stated that less than five percent of the population are infected with the Beta variant calling the British restrictions as ‘discriminatory towards French people’ and ‘making no sense in terms of health policy’.
A blueprint for responding to a coronavirus outbreak was drawn up by the UK government in 2005, The Independent can reveal, but the plan was seemingly “lost” in Whitehall, never acted upon or even considered when Covid-19 swept the planet. The document, drawn up in response to Sars, recommended building up infrastructure for virus testing and PPE stockpiling in case of an outbreak, while response measures included travel restrictions, isolating and testing contacts with infections and limiting “super-spreader” events. One former government adviser said that the framework – based on a coronavirus outbreak beginning in China and spreading across the globe – could have saved “tens of thousands of lives” if it had been used to guide the response to Covid-19. Instead, the draft contingency plan appears to have gone “missing” shortly after it was submitted, Whitehall sources past and present told The Independent.
