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> The quarantine for new arrivals has been in effect for 10 days

Given how effective arrival quarantines have been elsewhere (TW, NZ, SG, et al) and how long they’ve been in effect it’s frankly insane that the UK took this long to implement it.

I agree entirely here. In fact I know people at the time jumping up and down and saying "apply the Wuhan quarantine rules to everyone arriving from mainland Europe in general, or indeed anywhere".

The key to me seems to have been that measures were put in place slowly, at the pace ministers move at, rather than the pace experts can make decisions at. Asking everyone who returned to quarantine for 7 days would clearly have helped, with the benefit of hindsight.

I think the issue is that politicians tend to want to avoid imposing what are seen as invasive measures where they feel the risk is low. Their assessment of the level of risk posed by those returning from overseas holidays in February was clearly now, in the cold light of day, very poor.

The sheer number of people overseas at the time probably didn't help matters - some suggestions that as many as 1 million people were overseas at the time [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/19/uk-battling-to...

> Their assessment of the level of risk posed by those returning from overseas holidays in February was clearly now, in the cold light of day, very poor.

Frankly, it was clearly very poor even then. That they didn't realise that reflects poorly on them.

Rolling it out anytime between mid March and now would have been pointless. Early it would have helped, late it helps. In the middle there was so much circulating virus here that it would have made no difference.

Surely any mitigation is better than no mitigation.

I can’t imagine “we’re already drowning, no need to worry about that leak” is really a viable public health strategy in this scenario.

Maybe but there was barely any travel anyway and most of that was people desperately trying to get home. You'd be leaving those people stuck for very marginal benefits.

Leaving them stuck how, exactly? We’re talking about compulsory quarantine for arrivals.

Ah good point. Yes, I guess they could have done that with little cost.

Also, it's important to bear in mind that during the time period the UK needed to impose travel or quarantine restrictions on Europe, Italy was reporting two cases of coronavirus total, the most recent of which was someone repatriated from Wuhan and quarantined. That was less than the UK. There has been a chorus of articles from every corner of the British press insisting that the current quarantine is stupid and ill-thought-out because most of the countries it applies to are reporting fewer cases than the UK. The only way the media and pundit complaints about the UK not imposing quarantine earlier are anything but a cynical use of hindsight is if they'd have somehow been more supportive of this before the vivid demonstration of how a country reporting almost no cases could doom us all than they were after it. Which is absurd.

(The reason Italy was reporting so few cases seems to be that they weren't testing people who were hospitalized with symptoms unless they'd travelled to China or had contact with someone who had. There were a few other countries like the US which had similar criteria on paper, but they were generally willing to test other patients based on clinical suspicion. Italy apparently managed to genuinely fail to test hospitalized patients right up until the point where, by sheer coincidence, someone was hospitalized with coronavirus after contact with a traveller from China who turned out not to be the source of the infection.)

I mean given the level of international travel, putting a quarantine in place 2-3 months after the start of it seems like gross incompetence.

> It seems to me that what went wrong was a large number of UK residents were overseas in February/March (sspecially on ski breaks) to Italy, France and other mainland Europe destinations.

This is the same basic situation as Germany. Many of our largest outbreaks in March/April were traced back to a single sick barkeeper in an après-ski in Austria.