The government’s handling of airport quarantine has been a shambles – and it has not even started yet

Editorial: Ministers’ lack of clarity about Monday’s quarantine plans is undermining confidence in border controls

Connecting us with the world is precisely Heathrow’s problem (Getty)

The government has been so slow and careless about setting up a system of airport hotel quarantine that it must be suspected that ministers see it as a trial run. It is as if they want to create the system, knowing that it will not work well, but think it can then be improved and deployed more rigorously if needed. 

Indeed, many of the government’s scientific advisers seem relatively relaxed about the threat of new variants of coronavirus coming into the UK from abroad. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer, said last week that the South African variant was unlikely to become dominant here because our own “Kent variant” already has a transmissibility advantage. And most of the evidence is that vaccines are still effective against variants, even if they might be less so. 

So it may be that ministers see the quarantine system as a back-up, to be used if a variant emerges, somewhere in the world, that is significantly more deadly or more vaccine-resistant. That seems the most charitable explanation for the lackadaisical way in which the new quarantine rules have been brought in.