It is no longer necessary to isolate vaccinated contacts in the UK

Raoul Bobby

London, August 16 (EFE). From Monday, fully vaccinated people identified as having close contact with a positive person will no longer have to self-quarantine for ten days in the UK, something that until now for many Britons has been a real nightmare.

The NHS Covid-19 official app algorithm – essential for access to institutions – is a close contact with all those who, in the past five days, were “two meters away from a person infected with coronavirus for more than 15 minutes”.

At the end of last July, people reported by the app broke a record: 689,313 in just one week, many of them the wrong way. The British coined this phenomenon as “pandemic,” meaning something like “pandemic notifications.”

Going out with running the app was a risky sport. On the bus, on the subway, in the supermarket, in the restaurant…any place was a perfect target being captured by the application’s algorithm, which people started uninstalling in bulk.

For this reason, the British Ministry of Health decided at the beginning of August to modify the sensitivity of the application, which began to notify callers only during the past 48 hours, with the aim of limiting the effects of the “epidemic”.

For many people, a ten-day confinement for contacting an affirmative action proved to be a problem because they were unable to attend their scheduled jobs or social events.

This is the case of the British adventurer Kevin Chapman, who, according to his Twitter account, received the alert a few days before his brother’s wedding. Chapman complained about the “unclear” rules, when in his case he received both doses and his antigen test was negative.

In their case, they received the notice after visiting a water park and dining outside.

“We broke up really well there, ordered and paid for the mobile app, didn’t mingle with anyone and the table was cleaned before and after,” Chapman told Efe.

Not only customers have been affected by this “epidemic”, but also establishments such as Italian restaurant Terra Brasserie, whose manager, Giusseppe Stefanizzi, explained to EFE that they have experienced many “last-minute cancellations” especially in the past three weeks.

Stefanizzi is confident the new regulations encourage people to go out more comfortably and states that in her case, only one of her employees was notified through the app several months ago, asking her to “isolate herself anyway”. “It is better to be safe than to regret later,” he said.

On the other hand, in the summer months, passenger traffic is constant, despite the fact that, at the moment, to enter the UK from Spain – on the amber list – a pre-flight antigen test and PCR are required on the second day of arrival.

However, so far the protocol has indicated that if a positive result is reported during the flight, nearby passengers will also have to be booked on board for ten days.

This is what happened to the young man from Cadiz, Eduardo Revuelta, who was returning to London from Jerez airport after a vacation with his family. When he returned, they told him that he had tested positive at the airport and that he would spend the next 10 days locked up at home.

“I don’t understand that for someone at the airport, everyone should self-isolate,” says Revuelta, who comments that the confinement caused “a lot of stress” and that although his company paid him for the days he couldn’t go to work, he couldn’t. To attend a training course. EFE

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