….have to quarantine?
A Rye News reader has told us about a family member who had returned from a trip to Denmark on August 6. They had been fully vaccinated, tested as required before leaving Denmark and tested again following their return. Denmark is on the amber list of countries.
A few days later a high-viz jacketed person from the test and trace Stasi turned up at their door and insisted that they should be quarantining and not going out of the house. Her instructions were, she said, that everyone, regardless of vaccination status had to quarantine for 10 days on return from an amber list country. Despite protestations that, as from August 2, it was not necessary for them to quarantine, the test and trace checker stuck to her guns and insisted that she knew best as those were her instructions.
The official website – gov.org.uk – says the following will apply to fully vaccinated people coming from an amber list country:
From 2 August UK WIDE
If you’re coming to England from an amber list country and have been fully vaccinated with a vaccine approved by the bodies listed in this guide you:
- must take a COVID-19 pre-departure test
- must take a COVID-19 test on or before day 2 after you arrive in England – arrival day is day 0
- do not have to quarantine
Fortunately, our reader was made of sterner stuff, and realising that the checker didn’t know anything other than the lines she had been given to say, called the test and trace call centre on 119 where she spoke to a nice man called Trevor.
Trevor didn’t know the rules either and it took some time before he was able to understand that the words, “do not have to quarantine” meant that, in the case of our reader, one does not have to quarantine, and he finally agreed that that was indeed correct.
Now we all know that governments around the world have had their difficulties in finding ways to deal with the pandemic, and the British government is no exception and we know that they have had to recruit a lot of operatives who will have had no previous experience in the work they will have been asked to do, but are they really scraping the barrel to such an extent that they are using people who never listen to radio or TV news or read a newspaper? Do they not get any training?
One can perhaps understand it in the case of the door stepping checker whose sole instruction is to check that, say, Mrs Smith of 27 Acacia Avenue is staying home, when the checker may have no other information about Mrs Smith, but for the 119 call centre not to have been properly trained in the information they are likely to be asked for, is inexcusable.
So the moral of this incident is, check the rules for yourself, take no official’s word for it and if you think they are wrong, argue your case. On the basis of this example, you will probably be the one who is right.
Image Credits: Anthony Kimber .