The Telegraph - Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe, Gareth Davies, and Yolanthe Fawehinmi
A Government scientist has cast doubt over the effectiveness of a blanket quarantine arrangement for visitors to the UK.
Professor Robert Dingwall, a member of a sub-group of Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies), is a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), which reports to Sage.
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We are not seeing new clusters that are taking off from people who have been travelling abroad. I think we would really need to get the level in this country significantly further down before quarantine started to become a useful measure.
"That I think, even then, we would have to see something that is targeted on countries with a significantly higher level of community transmission than ourselves - and there aren't too many of those around, I'm afraid.
"If you're a holiday destination in Europe in a country that has worked really hard to get its levels of community transmission down and you're perhaps looking forward to seeing the end of the virus circulating, apart from in isolated outbreaks, then you have to wonder would they really want to welcome a load of British tourists from a country which hasn't fully got this virus under control yet?"
