Abolish Covid Travel Restrictions

On Monday, a headline BBC news story announced that hundreds of thousands of people might have breached quarantine rules on their arrival to England and Northern Ireland this spring. Amid the utter irrationality of the current Covid-related border panic, such news is likely to cause considerable outrage. However, if a large number of people did actually break the quarantine rules, what does that mean for the UK’s entire Covid travel restrictions regime, and does it make sense to have it in the first place?

As the BBC explains, the data was obtained through a Freedom of Information request and cover the period between 17th March and 31st May. During these two-and-a-half months, over a million people had reportedly arrived in the two UK regions (Scotland and Wales have had their own travel and enforcement strategies and are not included) from ‘amber list’ countries and were supposed to self-quarantine at home. Out of this million-or-so, just over 300 thousand cases of potential breaches were passed on to investigators. These referrals would reportedly happen in cases where health department call handlers (tasked with contacting travellers after their arrival to check their quarantine status) reported possible non-compliance due to the contact ending the call, refusing to co-operate, indicating they would break their quarantine or testing rules, or repeatedly not answering their phone.

It is not yet clear how many people out of these 300 thousand were actually found to have broken the quarantine rules, as the government has not offered any additional comments so far. This makes complete sense, as the last thing Boris Johnson’s government would want right now is to stoke any press-manufactured outrage going in the opposite direction of the public’s outcry over the possible introduction of vaccine passports, on which Johnson has supposedly started backpedalling (well, maybe). And that is also why the Labour opposition is going off the rails with the quarantine breach news. As the BBC reports, “Labour’s shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said the figures obtained by the BBC ‘confirm our worst fears’ about the government’s ‘lax border policy’”, before accusing the Home Office of “gross negligence”. 

Of course, such proclamations by Labour are nothing but political grandstanding; just routine accusations against one’s adversary of not governing properly. Of course, no one had any fears about “laxness” or lack thereof, because everyone knew from the start that it was not possible to fully enforce the home quarantines in any meaningful way. And it could have only been “gross negligence” if the government hadn’t been kinda sorta expecting this in the first place and didn’t know that it wouldn’t be such a big deal anyway.

But let’s get to the crux of the issue. This rhetoric by Labour only works because many people actually believe the Covid border story. It is a story about how strong regulations, travel hurdles, and disincentives at the border are (in part) what is keeping the country safe from more Covid cases and deaths. In other words, the travel restrictions are what allows the country to have almost complete internal lockdown freedom.

This story is incredibly weak, though. If Covid is already in Britain - which of course it is - then it matters little whether someone who tests positive contracted the virus during their trip to Spain or their commute to London. They are just as contagious - or not. People’s chances of getting infected in the first place depend mainly on what they did, not where they did it. Someone who works as a nightclub barman in Bristol is much more likely to contract the virus than someone who flew to Norway to observe moose in the wilderness. Just being abroad, as opposed to only travelling domestically, has nothing to do with the level of Covid risk one represents.

For some time, and even until today, another justification has also been used: those travel restrictions are necessary to prevent new variants from entering the country. But that is not how viruses work. There has never been, never was supposed to be, and couldn’t possibly be a complete ban on everyone coming in or out of the country. The restrictions were always supposed to limit border crossings rather than prevent them. But therein lies the issue. When it comes to new, more dangerous variants, the widely accepted view is that it takes only a handful of cases for them to start spreading throughout the population and competing with the variants already in circulation. And this handful of cases will happen no matter how harsh the border policies are. Stopping all cross-border relations and trade would be the only way to maybe avoid it, but that would also mean instant famines and an overall apocalypse. We cannot forget that while those harsh lockdowns we’ve gone through affected the average Joe immensely, most of the global trade still had to flow, and did.

So if the new variants are getting across the border no matter what the government does, it makes little sense to maintain the cumbersome restrictions as a whole. It doesn’t matter if slightly less or slightly more of a certain variant comes from abroad; the virus will replicate and spread either way. As usual, the government is maintaining the façade of doing something to avoid accusations of neglect and/or complacency, even though what it does only makes things more difficult for people without actually helping anything. But one cannot be surprised; the whole government, besides the violence, is just PR.

Any solution that relies on universal compliance is a bad solution and the people to blame when something inevitably goes awry are not those who don’t comply (because it is clear from the start that someone won’t) but those who designed the solution. A good solution, by contrast, makes the situation better with only some compliance and avoids at all costs the possibility of a small number of unavoidable dissenters ‘spoiling’ the effort. In our present case, if the news is accurate and around a third of all travellers really did breach the quarantine rules, and if Covid and its new variants can spread from a single patient or a handful of them, the UK might as well abolish the restrictions altogether. They literally serve no purpose when it comes to the virus while costing both the government and the travellers plenty of money and headaches.

At the moment, the only role the UK’s Covid travel restrictions regime plays is that of a tax on long-distance travel. The only difference from other taxes is that the money in this case doesn’t go to the government but to the Covid testing companies. Over the past few years, we have seen increasing calls for travel restrictions for environmental reasons, and what is effectively a travel tax would help with moving towards such goals - even if put in place for the wrong reasons. We might find that at the end of the day, there will be strong opposition, from the top, to the removal of the Covid travel regime, and it will be interesting to see whether the UK government will end up phasing it out, as it is rumoured to be planning to, or whether, like with many other of its promises, it will only amount to empty hopes and dreams.