From corona virus to the Uk future

Hi again.

Good question.  The simple answer is no, currently, the UK has none and has no plans to build any quarantine rooms at airports and borders.  They did take over a hotel at Heathrow to cope with the repatriation of some cruise ships, but that has been handed back to the owners as the citizens were proven free of disease and moved back to their own homes.

That's not to say that it won't happen, but I suspect that the preferred end game solution will be by vaccination, if you want to travel, you will need to have been vaccinated against the Corona virus; further, I think this has a long way to go till we see an end game.

The UK does have quite a sophisticated set up to deal with isolated cases of highly infectious diseases.

Cynic
Expat Team

About native English people who come from abroad infected

Couldn't bringing them infected to hospitals be a risk for more people?

I have ideas for England:

In my opinion:
It would be nice if Heathrow transformed the Heathrow hotel into a hospital for Corona Virus patients only

And make international flights down only at Heathrow

If England used a single border
And create a hospital next to the border

If England used a single port
And create a hospital next to the port

England would be solving internal cases

With greater control of cases coming from outside  the country

They have done so in what you have said.

Hi again.

It's good when people are thinking about this kind of thing, particularly in a subject which I know a bit about.  These are my thoughts, not Expat.com's.

I think you're rather missing the point; yes people entering the country is an issue, but the bigger issue is people travelling around the country, potentially spreading it as they go; it's why practically every country in the world is on lockdown of varying sorts to stop people moving.  One of the worrying aspects of COVID is you could have it and not know; the symptoms can take 28 days to develop, so you could arrive, be tested, deemed as being clear, then 28 days later be spreading it to who/whatever you touch; it's one of the reasons why the UK does not do screening on arrival.

To answer your points:

Heathrow Hotel - the single thing that identified a hospital as being suitable to treat COVID patients is ICU capacity, of which the most important part (after finding people to work in it) is Oxygen; I'm pretty certain that when they built that Holiday Inn back in the 70's that it wasn't piped for oxygen so would need to run from bottles, not ideal and road access to the hotel from the adjacent M25 is sometimes gridlocked.  It would probably be easier to flatten the existing building and build from new, or perhaps a more realistic option would be to use the nearby Hillingdon Hospital for it.

One airport - nationally, the UK was handling 6 flights p/minute prior to COVID; the average capacity of a single Boing 777 is 500 pax; I'll leave you to do the maths.

Land border - the only land border in the UK is between UK/Ireland; there are over 300 roads of different types that cross that border; nobody knows how many people cross the border daily.

Ports - there are 120 active commercial ports in the UK today, all of which have the ability to transfer passengers and crew.

Channel tunnel - took 2.6 million cars last year.

We could do what Germany did yesterday, namely require all people who are not vaccinated to enter 14-day quarantine on arrival, that kind of system would police itself once you recruit enough border police to make it work.  Whether it would be practical - who knows, but I do know the UK Government have some very clever people who do nothing else but plan this kind of stuff, I suspect they have this well in hand (unless some HR/HS idiot has sent them home).