I read that it should have been done as in some time ago - like, say, nearly a year ago and to be fair I still cannot get my head around why the UK allowed people to travel in and out of the country freely without any real regard for where they have come, where they were going and whether they were able to or would isolate.

It really beggars belief the crass stupidity of the UK government and then I see that they are the same ones that insisted on pushing ahead with Brexit without any delay - and then I realised that they were in fact both crass and stupid.

__________________
You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

Well it's nice to know that there are people reading posts and their response is to Shout grammatical corrections as opposed to storming buildings

If you look at the top, first world ‘Covid’ performing countries - Australia, Japan, Germany and New Zealand are 3 of the best.
Each of those countries has a big export base - Australia is mined materials, Japan and Germany is manufactured goods and New Zealand is lamb.
The UK economy is based mainly on the service and financial industries which in tails, I imagine, lots of foreign travel.

Just my thoughts here but, I suspect, the people in charge (whoever they are) wanted to keep things going and the holiday makers just piggy backed on to this opportunity.

Think you are probably right . Hopefully you wont get a visit from PrinceHarley....... Shame he doesnt practice what he preaches .

Used to be a travel forum.
Now a pro quarantine lock'emup forum.
Lockdowns masks and curfews never did much good did it?

Let's get our travelling spirit back asap.

Actually it worked very good here in Australia & that`s because we didn't take our foot off the brake until it was safe to do so by testing.

Problem with bumbling BoJo he`s always late taking action, and when he does its only a half arsed approach to the problem, he is more concerned about keeping the masses happy & business going (and taxes coming in), but its a failed economic approach.

What`s a human life worth? 91,470 to date, its shameful & what about the long term effects on people with the so called "Long Covid" its seems the generation between 20 & 30 are a bunch of selfish c**ts IMHO.

Mezo.

The virus doesn't travel. People do. Stop passing it on, the virus dies... pass it on, people die. Lockdown so far has been the only surefire way to stop people passing it on to each other. Your home country tried letting people use "common sense" and it experienced a death rate 10x worse than its neighbours who locked down. Your own king criticised the laissez-faire policy.

This will change as the vaccine is more widely deployed and we can get back to travelling safely and responsibly. The spirit is not dead, it's just being a grown-up staying home for a little while and preparing for the next trip.

+1

Looking at the curves UK has nothing to teach anyone.
Noone knows exactly why Norway and Finnland was spared compared to Sweden. Perhaps Stockholm is more like London than Oslo.
But we are much better off than most countries practicing useless lockdowns, maskwearing and even curfews. We are currently at #22, better than UK, France, Italy, USA....
Australia with less than 1000 dead is an extreme example of over-reacting.
The negative effects of the actions taken are much worse than the virus, both for economy and public health.
According to FAO 250 million risk starvation with an additional 6.7 million children 2020 - not from the virus mind you, but from the stupid actions taken.
https://gho.unocha.org/global-trends...-make-it-worse
And that is only a small part of the problem.
So the sooner we open up, the better. It is up to the governments to provide adequate health care and protect the vulnerable. Never in history has anyone had the crazy idea to lock healthy people up in an epidemic. Nor was it in the WHO recommendations, until they lost their nerve in March last year. From October 2019:
https://www.who.int/influenza/public...ublication/en/

Now the only way out of the mess appears to be successful vaccination. Then BoJo can (and will) claim to have saved the queen's own country. And we can travel again, inch'allah.

So if lockdowns, maskwearing and curfews are "useless" what does work?

Vaccines are the obvious 'jam tomorrow' big one but they've only become available in the last month or so and will take at least another six months to get to everyone (or everyone who'll have it anyway). So what should we have been doing for the last year? Even now Sweden has far fewer restrictions than most other eurocountries, so explain to me why the bug has not been rampaging through the population. Population density perhaps? Anti social attitudes? Better health service? Less fat people than in the UK (or Spain/ France / Italy etc)? What's worked for you and failed miserably here?

You're optimistic, it will take all of 2021 to vaccinate the elderly & the vulnerable, then the over 50`s are next & finally the generation who think they are bulletproof.

And that`s before we have to deal with the "Anti-Vaxers" Sigh.



Mezo.

There's a lot of smoke but not much fire from the anti-vaxers so far here, but that's because for the most part the vaccination programme hasn't got to them yet. It won't be long though - if they keep going at the present rate they'll have done all of the most vulnerable groups by mid Feb and be moving on to the slightly less vulnerable. Best guess is to be getting to somewhere around herd immunity levels of vaccinations by mid summer. That's for the UK, and it would seem, for once in our lives, we seem to be doing something ahead of the curve.

There's a lot of unknowns in that though and what percentage of people are going to actually refuse it at the point where the needle is heading for their arm is a guess. There's a lot of people saying they won't have it but that covers a whole load of individual reasons - playing politics, misguided, religious convictions, uncontactable, couldn't care less, terminally stupid, medically unable, needle phobic etc etc. As a nation (and further up the ladder, as a species) we don't need everyone to have it, just enough to stop it spreading. If it turns out that anti-vaxing is a real issue it'll be interesting to see what measures various countries bring in to 'encourage' compliance. It'll be 'educate' and persuade to start with before carrot gives way to stick. Who's going to use what stick though?

As soon as anti-vaxxers realise they can't go on holiday.......

Actually, I think that the UK can teach a lot of countries about Covid. Essentially the lesson is - don't follow the lead of the UK as the government here are made up of incompetent liars.

The obe area that we are leading in a good way is vaccine distribution - clearly the government's ministers have been kept away from that and the NHS have dealy with it directly.

Perhaps the people in Sweden are better at following advice than many of the idiots in the UK, America etc. However the fact that your king has criticized the approach says a lot.

Wow, just wow.

I willbear that in mind next bweek when I go to my father-in-law's funeral - yes, he died from Covid.

Actually, this is how pandemics are routinely sorted out. For instance in Eyam in Derbyshire during the Black Death they locked down the whole village to stop the spread in the local area - and it worked. Malta has isolation hospital dating back 200+ years that reduced the risk of the spread of disease. China has limited the spread of this pandemic pretty effectively by locking down. The counbtries that didn't lockdown are those that have really suffered - Johnson has been too slow to act every time and has preferred not to make decisions.

I can't really see the start of travel on anything like the scale we have done in the past for a good 15 months or more.

__________________
You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey's end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.

You're right there, anyway. My country's government has handled the pandemic among the worst in the world, succeeding in achieving not only one of the world's highest per-capita death rates but also among the worst economic slumps. This isn't because they have locked down, it's because they have consistently locked down late and lite after long spells complacently allowing mixing in public places, schools and workplaces. Our latest lockdown came on 4 January after watching a rapid increase in infections and doing nothing since September. When you don't have an effective test/trace/isolate system in place to control the virus at low levels your only weapon is to forcibly keep people apart, hopefully before it becomes a crisis.

You say "nobody knows" why Sweden has done worse than its neighbours, with all due respect sir, everybody knows. Voluntary measures do not work. Frankly I'd much rather have gone down the path of Australia and New Zealand, strict control of contact to reduce transmissions then trace and act on every case. Result, no national crisis, healthy economies and fewer dead. The UK is about to pass the milestone of 100,000 dead, our government has nothing to teach anybody but some of us can see how it could and should have done so much better.