British tourists flying home yesterday after a holiday in Spain angrily reacted to an abrupt decision by their government to make everyone arriving from the Mediterranean country spend 14 days in quarantine.
The UK’s decision late on Saturday to take Spain off a safe travel list over a rise in COVID-19 cases there took effect from midnight, leaving travelers with no time to dodge it, and with major concerns about their returns, tourists at Madrid’s Barajas airport said.
“It’s really bad, because it’s just come all of a sudden, it’s not given very much time to prepare so everyone is now panicking,” said Emily Harrison, from Essex, who was taking a flight to London and faced the prospect of having to self-isolate for two weeks.
“It ruins plans for everybody,” Harrison said. “We had a wedding to go to and we had plans to visit friends and family who we haven’t seen in a very long time, and now we are going to have to cancel all those plans, so it’s really quite upsetting.”
Spain was one of the worst-hit countries in Europe by the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 272,000 cases and more than 28,000 deaths. It imposed strict lockdown measures to contain the spread, gradually easing them earlier in the summer.
Spain had been on a list of countries that the British government had said were safe for travelers to visit.
However, it has seen a surge of cases in the past few weeks, prompting most regions to impose rules for masks to be worn everywhere and, in several areas including Barcelona, calls for people to stay at home.
Asked by Sky News why the decision was taken with so little notice, British Secretary of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dominic Raab: “Because the cases in Spain, the data we got was on the Friday, we obviously compiled that through the course of the day.”
“It showed a big jump right across mainland Spain. That was then assessed yesterday afternoon and we took the decision as swiftly as we could. We can’t make apologies for doing so; we must be able to take swift, decisive action,” he said, describing the move as “a real-time response”
The way the government made the decision to impose quarantine on travelers from Spain was “shambolic,” the health policy chief for Britain’s main opposition Labour Party said yesterday.
“I can understand why the government have made this decision ... but of course the way in which this decision has been made in the last 24 hours is frankly shambolic,” Jonathan Ashworth told Sky News, saying that the British government had given those Britons holidaying in Spain no time to plan for a quarantine by bringing in the new rule with little notice.
A collapse of tourism from the UK would have far more of an impact on Spain’s economy. Britons made up more than 20 percent of foreign visitors to Spain last year, the largest group by nationality, a key source of income for a country that depends on tourism for about 12 percent of its economy.
The British foreign ministry advised against all but essential travel to mainland Spain, prompting regional authorities in the Canary and Balearic islands to say they would try to get an exemption from the quarantine.
In Spain, nightclubs, bars and beaches are facing new lockdown restrictions after turning into coronavirus hot spots.
Catalonia now hosts two of the most worrying virus hotspots in Spain, prompting authorities in Barcelona and an interior agricultural area around Lleida to tighten restrictions that were relaxed only a month ago, when Spain had its devastating outbreak in check.
Additional reporting by AP
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