UK Travellers Upset At Extra Week Of Quarantine

Some travellers who arrived in Hong Kong from the UK on Monday – hours before a travel ban kicked in at midnight – were not impressed by the news that they must now spend an extra week in quarantine, on top of the two weeks that they had planned for.

The government had announced the additional measures while they were still in the air – as Hong Kong joined jurisdictions around that world that have slapped travel bans on the UK as a new, more infectious variant of coronavirus spreads in parts of the country.

While passengers who arrived before midnight can stay, they must be confined to a designated hotel for the first two weeks of their quarantine, followed by an extra week at home.

One traveller who flew in from London via Doha, surnamed Limbu, only found out about the extra week in quarantine when he was asked for a reaction by reporters waiting at the airport.

“Twenty-one [days]? Not 14?” he asked.

Pressed if he thought this was too long, he said “Yes, maybe too much… It affects my work,” though he added, “you need to be careful.”

Another passenger, surnamed Chan, said he had only planned to stay here for three weeks to sort out some visa issues, and now he’ll have to spend the entire time in quarantine.

“This is a waste of my time and money. [The new measure] caught me completely off-guard,” he said, adding that the government needs to explain in greater detail why the extra quarantine time is needed.

He was also annoyed that no one had told him about the extended quarantine while he was passing through customs checks.

Hong Kong University microbiologist Siddarth Sridhar, however, said the government’s prudent approach is warranted because of how little we know about the new coronavirus variant at the moment.

“We are really uncertain about the impact of this emerging variant on a lot of critical aspects of Covid-19, such as how infectious it is, how transmissible it is, and even the effect on the newly-licenced vaccines is actually unclear at this stage so this is quite a sensible move,” he said.