Seven-day quarantine trial could lead to more lasting changes
THE resilience of the island’s Covid-19 testing strategy will be under scrutiny when an ambitious new seven-day quarantine period is piloted.
A maximum of 1,376 passengers who arrive between 5 and 10 July will be offered testing on the seventh day after their arrival.
The decision to look at the potential for easing the border restrictions was made partly because new testing equipment has now arrived in the island, meaning that up to 400 people can be tested in one day.
The authorities want to direct this extra testing capacity at the borders after feedback from travellers that the current mandatory 14 day self-isolation period was damaging their mental and physical health.
There is no timeline on when a seven-day isolation period could be introduced if the pilot is successful.
The chairman of the Civil Contingencies Authority, Deputy Gavin St Pier, said that first they had to establish whether the system could meet the new challenge.
‘A key part of this is actually making sure we’ve got the resources to be able to cope if it were to become a permanent feature of our border control, so that we could actually manage that programme for a larger number of passengers travelling if that was to become the case.
‘There’s no point us announcing something that we can’t deliver on.’
A primary theme of yesterday’s press conference was the desire to find a balance between the risk of coronavirus, and the freedom, mental and physical health of the population.
The president of Health & Social Care, Deputy Heidi Soulsby, said the island may need to learn to live with Covid-19 for months to come and travellers have found the current rules very tough.
‘We can’t assume that there will an effective vaccine. The noise now is quite positive so we still think that’s a possibility, but we can’t rely on it.
‘We can’t just hang around and wait for a vaccine, it’s not fair for islanders, that two weeks of self-isolation is difficult, so we need to see what we can do to do things differently.’
Guernsey has become a poster child for the international community on how to handle the Covid-19 pandemic, and a step towards a possible seven-day isolation period is another example of the island forging its own path.
The disease is widely accepted to have a 14-day incubation period and most countries have stuck with 14 days isolation.
However, the island’s authorities have carried out extensive modelling, and are convinced that the local evidence is stacking up to support a possible change in the border policy.
