New overseas quarantines announced as government tightens the grip

A fresh set of quarantine restrictions on arrivals from European countries has been announced. France, the Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and Aruba will be removed from the list of coronavirus travel corridors, effective after 4am on Saturday, in another example of the government’s willingness to take sharp action to avoid a second wave of infections.

This will be seen as an unnecessary and belligerent move by some, not least the governments of the sanctioned nations. France’s transport secretary, J-Baptiste Djebbari, has tweeted that Macron’s government “regrets the UK decision and will apply reciprocal measures in the field of transport.”

There will be a material hit to French hospitality, with around 500,000 Britons due to travel to France in the coming weeks. Being outranked by Boris Johnson is not something that Macron is prone to accept, and we could well see him hit back in other ways over the coming weeks.

Still, the government has good reason to shield Britons from our European neighbours. France’s 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 people reached 32.1 on Thursday, compared with 18.5 in the UK. For context, the case rate in Preston was 33 per 100,000 when tighter restrictions were imposed last week. Ministers believe their rapid-response approach to foreign spikes has been vindicated by the situation in Spain, where hospitalisations have quintupled since early July after a spike in cases a few weeks ago. 805 people have been hospitalised over the last seven days.

A notably different direction is being taken domestically. Today, the government has announced it will resume the easing of lockdown following a delay in late July. More beauty shops, small wedding receptions and live indoor performances will be permitted to resume from tomorrow, as well as Bowling alleys, casinos and soft play centres. This will “allow more people to return to work and the public to get back to more of the things they have missed,” according to the Prime Minister.

There is a quiet sense in Westminster that, having experienced one of the worst epidemics in the world at the start of the pandemic, the government has now got a much better handle of the crisis than many other major western nations. The UK now tests more per capita than most European countries, matching Germany with its high test-to-case ratios. Supporters of the government were buoyed last week by an Office for National Statistics analysis showing that the incidence of the disease had decreased in Britain despite the spikes occurring elsewhere, and there has been a belated change in the definition of coronavirus deaths, bringing the UK in line with European countries, which has reduced the death toll by 5,377.

Despite these positive changes, however, the UK continues to have the highest excess death rate in Europe. That explains above all why the government is so eager to take the action it has today.