Thinking about hotel quarantine- why don’t they just DO it ?

This Government is awful on any form of planning or logistics. I am fed up with reading articles about the virus and its effect on our lives that are peppered with words like, might, perhaps, possibly, may etc. Just make a firm decision and do it straight away. I wonder if all this dithering and faffing about when making decisions has resulted in being where we are today. No further forward than last March.

I agree that making it free would be a bad move. Then you have to decide what would be provided for whatever the travellers were charged. Just accommodation? Free breakfast? Three meals a day? Coffee and cake?

If travel were restricted to absolute necessity or emergency, there would be fewer people travelling, so it might be possible for the Govt (or rather, the taxpayer) to bear the cost as a humanitarian move.

Of course people who have been in holiday should pay for themselves. They took a chance knowing things could change at any time.
There must be a reasonably simple way to determine between them and those who had no choice about being away.

We were confined to a hotel room in Perth for a week before being able to return to the U.K.
We arrived in Perth after having been in Australia for 2 months!
We paid for it and I can say it was the worst hotel stay that we have ever had. Still we did it and just put up. Their country, their rules.
Was amazed when we got back here how little information was available. We isolated at home for 2 weeks.

It’s been horrible here , like a police state but it has worked. Mind you, at one stage many of us could happily have throttled the Premier. He was called Chairman Dan and compared with Chairman Mao.

I don't mind $$$

No need to apologise for correcting erroneous information, Alegrias

Don’t do it free. We learnt that lesson after quite some time, it was bleeding us dry. Warn people and then at a fixed date charge them 150 quid per person- sorry I don’t know how to get pound signs on my tablet, only $$

It can't be free.

Other countries who have done this are charging people, I believe it's A$2,000 per person in Australia for two weeks' quarantine in a hotel.
It's not without its difficulties either as cases of Covid in Australia have been spread by workers in the quarantine hotels who have passed it on to others.
Stringent lockdown measures have followed immediately this has happened and borders have been closed.

I agree that compulsory, supervised free quarantine would be good, but having no entry at all unless for emergencies and by special permission would be better.

Plus, if holidaying were allowed, and every holiday-maker were housed and fed free for ten days, the quarantine hotels would be packed with familes returned from a fortnight of sun, sea and sand and in need of entertainment for the children. Who would organise that?

nanna8

Deepest and humblest apologies to Alegrias for making a mistake. Just heard on our news that it is the first in Europe. Please don’t take me to court

You're on the naughty step nanna8 .

My main point here is the slowness to react. The figures are actually incidental, bad though they are.

Pointing out three posts into the thread that there is a mistake in the opening post is a GOOD thing. It shows it up to those who have just started to read the thread, so they don't continue with the wrong fact in their mind. 100,000 is bad and among the leaders, but that doesn't make us the first to reach that number.

Deepest and humblest apologies to Alegrias for making a mistake. Just heard on our news that it is the first in Europe. Please don’t take me to court

Correction . It was the highest in Europe not the world. Still shocking though considering the uk is an island and had every chance to stop the virus early on.

I apologise for deflecting the thread. If people didn't post things that were egregiously wrong, I wouldn't feel the need.

In the spirit of the thread, I definitely agree with the idea of quarantine hotels and think they should have been brought in earlier.

I agree with Alegrias, it’s important to highlight false information regardless of where your post is in the thread.

However, I also agree with the OP, we should have shut our borders right at the start and arranged for hotel lockdowns as they did in Australia. I often wonder when I see photos of the crowded arrival halls at Heathrow just who these travellers are and why they are not staying at home. They do not all look like business people who might need to travel for work purposes, many are in family groups with children.

You're deflecting from the OP Alegrias. Which is fine halfway through a thread, but third post?

Of course its not something to be proud of Oldbat1. I think you'll find I never said we weren't near the top. But we're far from being the first to 100,000 and that's what I'm pointing out.

Highlighting false information is not the same as denying the pandemic.

Well personally I’m really saddened and very very disappointed to be up there leading the deaths in the world we are a very very small country Alegrias1 We are very very near the top if you say we’re not which is nothing at all to be proud of.

We have news that the uk is the first to reach 100,000 deaths from Covid

Not true. USA have 430,000. Brazil, India and Mexico are also over 100,000. I have friends and relatives in Australia who seem to think we are living in Armageddon. I don't know what the news down there is telling them. Things are bad, but its not quite Mad Max territory yet.

Because our government never 'just does' anything. They have to have a long period of prevarication and indecision before finally coming to a poorly thought out conclusion. (Or maybe they're hunting around for some friends or tory donor who can make a huge profit from hotel quarantining)

Of course, the matter with Johnson is that he's actually useless. Anyone who has worked with him over the years can tell you that...