Limited travel ban is 'pointless,' say SAGE scientists as they urge hotel quarantine for all passengers

The partial travel ban targeting only countries with new covid variants is “pointless,” say SAGE scientists, as they urged ministers to extend it to all arrivals into the UK.

They warned that limiting it to 33 “red list” countries covering South America, southern Africa, UAE and Portugal would be ineffective against other emerging strains and travellers who could still enter the UK by going through a third country.

An additional 26 countries where there is no travel ban and only pre-departure testing and quarantine already have reported evidence of the the Brazilian or South African covid strains having spread to them.

England may also be put out of kilter with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which are considering travel bans that would require all arrivals to quarantine in state-approved hotels.

At present, Boris Johnson is only proposing quarantine hotels for Britons coming from the 33 red list countries. Professor Kamlesh Khunti, a member of the Government's Sage advisory group and the chair of its ethnicity subcommittee, told The Telegraph he regards the new measures as "pointless".

"People could be coming through other countries and there are other variants cropping up all the time," he said. "If we had a blanket ban, we would know exactly where we stand.

“A complete travel ban would be difficult but having hotel quarantine would be a fair system that would apply to everyone. "Border control has to be as tight as possible to ensure we are not letting anything through, and if we have a blanket system that would ensure that."

The Daily Telegraph identified a total of 155 connecting flight routes from 25 of the 30 'red list' countries that would allow people to return to the UK, and potentially sidestep the quarantine hotel restrictions.

Professor Susan Michie, a health psychology professor at University College London who sits on Sage, said quarantine hotel rules must be more comprehensive to succeed.

“The problem about only using measures for these 30 countries is that there could be other countries that just haven’t found variants,” she said.

“It depends on how good their genomic sequencing is. What we know from previous experience is that people sometimes avoid quarantine by coming into the country through second or even third countries through indirect routes. So it makes sense to have one rule applied to everybody, and as a blanket rule.”

Dr Gabriel Scally, president of epidemiology and public health of the Royal Society of Medicine, said he was "not convinced" by hotel quarantine measures that will only apply to some countries. "It doesn't go far enough. It should be universal and there should be no exemptions," he said.

"It's so easy for people to change flights at various hubs around the world, and I doubt procedures at Border Control will be sufficiently strict.

"This quarantine period should be 14 days instead of 10, in keeping with what we know about the virus, and it must apply to everyone. We need to get ahead of the virus, particularly with so many new mutations appearing around the world.”

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome trust, tweeted: “For any travel restrictions to work need to be comprehensive and in place for a long time.”

The Department of Health has been tasked with setting up the quarantine hotels with no indications yet how it will be enforced through security guards or fines.

It is also yet to be detailed whether the Government or hotels will be expected to underwrite the travellers who cannot or will not pay will be handled.