Paid test on arrival to skip quarantine?
 

Sorry if this has been mentioned elsewhere, I couldn’t find too many references to it.

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel...-a9602721.html

Could this be in place by the end of the summer? To save those opening the link, there is a suggestion that a test could be rolled out as an option on arrival from countries that are currently not on the UK’s ‘safe’ list. This would be a paid test at the passengers discretion on a arrival, where a £c100 fee would allow the passenger to be tested with results back in a few hours. A negative test would mean no quarantine necessary, whereas a positive would yield the opposite requirement as expected.

Seems like a good initiative to me. I expect it’ll probably come into place and become something of a new normal if you’re travelling back from the US for example.

If a UK resident, you could just go home , book a test online and get the results back in 48 hours.

But currently there is nothing in place to override the 14 day quarantine unless I’m mistaken?

No, unless you are exempt from the list of exemptions they have.

Surely a negative test would do?

This is being discussed in the Corona virus forum :-

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/coro...-arrivals.html

No - there is no such exemption in the statutory framework. For the law to change the government would have to examine the accuracy of such testing - in particular over what period of time you’d have to be tested to ensure an infection isn’t missed in its early stages.

Yes, and I think based on some of the informed posts on the thread DYKWIA linked to, it appears very unlikely that in the short or medium term that exemptions to self isolation based on testing would happen.

My own view is anyone planning to travel for the rest of the year should do so on the basis of the current scheme and not make any assumptions on possible exemptions due to testing.

So we'll close this one and request discussions continue in the linked thread in the CV19 forum.