Sky News’ Kay Burley lashed out at Travel Secretary Grant Shapps for lacking clarity on new coronavirus quarantine travel rules. Ms Burley demanded to know why it had taken the Government so long to come up with new restrictions. Ms Burley said: “People arriving on international flights into England may no longer have to quarantine for 14 days from mid-December.
“They will be able to self-isolate only for 5 days but only with a negative Covid test but they will have to pay for it.
“What has taken this so long Mr Shapps?”
Mr Shapps replied: “It is quite a complicated thing to put in place as you have got to match up the medical ability with the science for the number of days with the capacity that is or isn’t available.
“We all know how difficult it has been, despite having the biggest amount of testing anywhere in Europe.
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“We still wanted to make sure tests were available for doctors, nurses, teachers and many others before turning to people travelling from abroad.
“We have done that by turning to the Private sector for these tests.
“There are more complexes as you have got to know who is taking the test and what the results have been and feed that back into passenger locator forms.
“There has been a lot of things to get us to this point but I think now what we have got is a system that other countries will indeed follow.”
He continued: “When you travel abroad there is a new passenger locator form and that form needs to know where you are staying.
“There is the technicality of needing to update that if you do get a successful negative test so Public Health England and the police don’t come and pursue you for having left your home.
“You have got to tie that in with medical evidence about how we know day five is the right day to go rather than day one, seven.
“I’m afraid the science has taken time, along with the administration and the private sector to be at capacity to deliver the kind of private testing that will now be enabled.”
