Seven-day quarantine until at least October
GUERNSEY’S seven-day quarantine regime will remain in place until October at the very earliest, and the next big step to reduce travel restrictions may include charging for Covid-19 tests on arrival at the airport and harbour.
Details have been released about what phase 5c out of lockdown will look like, but no firm start date has yet been given.
The authorities are keen to make sure that everything is in place to allow testing on arrival to be a smooth process, and they also want to see improvements in the infection rates of surrounding jurisdictions.
The building of new testing facilities at the airport and harbour should be finished by 7 September, but there has been a delay on the arrival of new equipment which is a vital part of increasing local testing capacity to more than 2,000 per day.
This equipment was ordered in July, but the manufacturer has indicated that it will not arrive until the last week of September, and it will then take a while to check it works before it can be used in practice.
Deputy Heidi Soulsby, the president of Health & Social Care, said the plans were all coming together, but there was no set date for the next stage.
‘We can’t say specifically when until we’ve got the equipment, and we make sure it’s all right, but we’ll probably be looking at October.’
As revealed earlier in the week, the authorities are sticking with the system of dividing countries into high risk, safe, or very safe.
Self-swabbing will be used at the borders because of a desire to cut down delays, and children under 12 will not be required to take part.
Under phase 5c, people arriving from group A countries, which are regarded as high risk, will take a test on arrival and whatever the result they will have to quarantine for 14 days.
For group B countries, which currently include the UK and Jersey, travellers will take the test and as soon as they receive a negative result they can come out of quarantine.
The threshold between group A and group B countries is a prevalence of 30 cases per 100,000 over 14 days.
The cost of the next regime has been estimated at £3.7m. over six months, plus a capital outlay of £600,000.
On top of that there will be up to 175 parking spaces lost on the east arm of North Beach.
Deputy Gavin St Pier, the chair of the Civil Contingencies Authority, said it was a substantial sum of money and therefore it was their duty to consider a charging policy.
‘Charging does exist in other jurisdictions, and as a responsible government spending taxpayers’ money we have to consider where the fair burden should rest.’
One word that was repeatedly mentioned at yesterday’s press conference was ‘mitigation’, and the authorities sounded confident that they have plotted a path that is sensible and reasonable.
