10 2GM Friday August 28 2020 | the times
News
The government’s “in-out” quarantine
policy faced further criticism yesterday
after the announcement of travel
restrictions on Jamaica, the Czech
Republic and Switzerland.
Grant Shapps, the transport secre-
tary, said that Britons returning from
the three countries would be forced to
self-isolate for two weeks after a sharp
rise in coronavirus cases. He insisted
that people who failed to follow the
rules could be fined up to £1,000.
Restrictions will come into force at
4am on Saturday, prompting a scram-
ble for up to 20,000 Britons to return
before the deadline. The Foreign Office
has also changed its travel advice in
relation to the countries, warning
against all non-essential journeys.
At the other end of the spectrum, re-
strictions have been removed from
people entering Britain from Cuba.
The updates mean that the govern-
ment has imposed travel restrictions on
people arriving into the UK from 17
countries in little more than a month
having previously declared that they
were “safe” for holidaymakers. This in-
cludes Spain, France, the Netherlands,
Belgium, Austria, Croatia, Malta and
Luxembourg.
Other countries such as Canada and
Singapore have been on the “red” list —
classified as unsafe to travel to — for
months despite now recording a lower
number of cases per head than Britain.
Concerns are rising that the govern-
ment may be forced to reimpose blan-
ket quarantine on all arrivals into the
UK — replicating the policy imposed
for less than a month from the start of
June — because of a rise in infection
rates across the world.
Mr Shapps wrote on Twitter yester-
day: “As with all air bridge countries,
please be aware that things can (and do
sometimes) change quickly. Only trav-
el if you are content to unexpectedly 14-
day quarantine on return.
“Quarantining on return from a non-
travel corridor country is a legal re-
quirement and you commit a criminal
offence if you break that quarantine.
Fines, as well as a criminal record, can
result.”
Leaders in the aviation industry have
consistently called for the introduction
of testing at the border as an alternative
to the constantly changing quarantine
rules.
Charlie Cornish, the chief executive
of Manchester Airports Group, which
runs Manchester, Stansted and East
Midlands, criticised the government’s“sluggish, chaotic and illogical ap-
proach to travel restrictions”.
Paul Charles, founder of the PC
Agency, the travel consultants, said:
“The weekly in-out, snakes and lad-
ders-style quarantine game is just not
helping the travel sector in any way
whatsoever. This policy must be aban-
doned and replaced by effective testing.
“There is a danger that we will simply
return to blanket quarantine, which
was abandoned after only three and a
half weeks because it was so unpopular.
That’s the way we are heading.”
The government has said that quar-
antine measures will be applied to
people arriving from countries that
record more than 20 cases of the virus
per 100,000 people over a seven-day
period. Figures show that Jamaica has
recorded 20.8 cases per 100,000 in the
past week. Numbers stood at 22 in
Switzerland. People returning toAs many as 10 million dental appoint-
ments were cancelled in England dur-
ing lockdown, according to the first
figures to highlight the effects of the
pandemic on the nation’s teeth.
Data obtained by the British Dental
Association (BDA) under freedom of
information laws revealed a “calami-
tous fall” in visits from late March to
early June. The BDA warned that the
waiting list backlog could take months
to clear.
Dave Cottam, chairman of the asso-
ciation’s general dental practice com-
mittee, said: “Since March patient ac-
cess has fallen off a cliff, and there is no
certainty when or if it can be restored.
“Access was in a bad place pre-pan-
demic. We should lament how few
children and adults made it to an NHS
dentist last year, but the real question
now is how we can even bring the ser-
Dentists sound alarm over 10m missed appointments
vice back to these levels. We have prac-
tices struggling, and tens of millions of
patients need somewhere to go. We
need the government to work with us to
rebuild capacity.”
The lack of routine appointments
could lead to diseases such as mouth
cancer being missed, experts warned.
Dental practices were instructed to
close for routine care and provide only
urgent treatment from March 25 to
June 8 as part of restrictions to reduce
the risk of coronavirus transmission.
The data obtained by the BDA indi-
cates that access to the Urgent Dental
Care Network, which was set up to treat
emergencies during lockdown,
amounted to about 2 per cent of normal
levels of activity. The numbers suggest
that roughly 10 million appointments
were cancelled.
Paperwork lodged by dentists with
the NHS Business Services Authority
indicates that 83,300 courses of treat-ment were delivered in May, compared
with a monthly average of about 3.
million prior to the pandemic.
Recent surveys by the BDA also indi-
cate that a majority of practices were
still operating at less than a quarter of
their former capacity despite the re-
sumption of face-to-face care on June 8.
Dentists face barriers to expanding
capacity, the BDA said, including the
need to leave surgeries empty for 60
minutes after an aerosol generating
procedure. Unless regulations evolve, it
said that tens of millions of patients in
England will effectively lose access to
dental services.
Concerns over the Covid-19 effect on
dental care comes a day after it was re-
vealed the NHS had a “hidden waiting
list” of 15.3 million patients who need
follow-up appointments for health
problems.
The official waiting list, which stands
at 3.9 million, shows how many patientsare yet to have their first hospital
appointment after a GP referral.
However, the total number who are on
hospital books in England and need ap-
pointments is not collated centrally.
A new calculation by the healthcare
technology company Medefer, based
on freedom of information requests to
NHS trusts and seen by The Times, puts
the figure at 15.3 million.
Although the official waiting list has
remained at a fairly stable level
throughout the pandemic, this has
been mainly driven by fewer patients
joining it. Long waits have increased,
with the number of patients waiting
more than a year standing at 50,536 in
June, compared with 1,643 in January.
The Times reported last Saturday
that more than a hundred MPs had
written to Boris Johnson urging him to
tackle a backlog in NHS cancer care
that threatens to lead to thousands of
deaths over the next decade.Rhys Blakely Science Correspondent
Coming and going
At least 17 countries and territories
have been removed from the
government’s “travel corridor” list in
the past month having been initially
declared safe for tourists. These
include Spain, France, the
Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia,
Malta, Austria, Switzerland, the
Czech Republic, Luxembourg,
Monaco, Andorra, Jamaica, Trinidad
and Tobago, the Bahamas, the Turks
and Caicos islands and Aruba.Jamaica, Switzerland and
Czech Republic join list
Graeme Paton Transport Correspondent Scotland from Switzerland already
have to quarantine.
The addition of Jamaica came almost
a week after Usain Bolt tested positive
for Covid-19 following his 34th birth-
day party on the island. Raheem Ster-
ling, the England and Manchester City
footballer, was among a large number
of guests at the eight-time Olympic
gold medallist’s event, although he sub-
sequently returned a negative result.
Greece, a favourite of British tourists,
is safe from the quarantine list at
present, on 14.9 cases per 100,000, but
has seen infections rise almost nine-
fold in a month to 1,596 in the past week.
Fabian Picardo, the chief minister of
Gibraltar, has spoken of his concerns
that the territory could soon be hit by
the same travel restrictions. It has the
equivalent of more than 100 cases per
100,000 people and has been named as
a “high-risk” destination by Germany.
Mr Picardo told Toda y on BBC Radio
4 that Gibraltar was being unfairly
judged because it tested more of its pop-
ulation than practically anywhere else
in the world. He said that almost 32,
people, or 95 per cent of the population,
had been tested and that 2 per cent of
inhabitants were tested a day.
“We’re doing a good job in detecting
the virus and dealing with it,” Mr Picar-
do said. “If you do a more detailed dive
and you look at the fact that we are do-
ing more testing than most places per
head of population, then you’ll under-
stand that we are now being very
successful at identifying cases of the
virus and then exercising controls in
terms of imposing self-isolation, et cet-
era. I’d be concerned about the impact
on people who are having to travel to
the United Kingdom from Gibraltar
not just for the exchange of tourism. It’s
about business, it’s about studies, it’s
about health.”
6 Southend airport in Essex said yes-
terday that some passengers would no
longer be forced to remove liquids and
electrical equipment from their bags at
security. The measure, intended to
speed up the process and reduce con-
tact with staff, follows the installation
of new scanning equipment at one
security line. The Hi-Scan 6040, devel-
oped by Smiths Detection, a London-
based company, will be introduced on
other lines in coming months.
Iain Martin, page 29
Usain Bolt tested positive after his party in Jamaica, now on the restrictions listNews Coronavirus
O
fficials in hazmat suits
boarded a Ryanair
flight and removed a
passenger after he
received a text telling
him he had tested positive for
Covid-19 (Charlie Parker writes).
The man and his friend were
escorted off minutes before the
plane was due to leave Stansted forInfected
passenger
escorted
from plane