Planes, trains, automobiles and covid
In which I commit travel
Reader, I am attempting international travel. Involving four countries with four different covid surveillance systems. Thoughts and prayers, as they say. Thoughts and prayers.
The UK system is the complicated and flawed traffic lights system which divides countries in red, amber and green, each category with its own set of arrival and testing rules. The EU countries have agreed on some rules, and keep others independent. Non-EU countries of Eastern Europe also have covid control rules for border crossings, usually a test or proof of vax, and as for Canada, Canada won’t let its own citizens back into the country without an app being filled out, documents provided and a negative PCR test results submitted.
To travel to the UK, which recently put Canada on the Green List, I was expected to 1) do a rapid antigen test, 2) fill out a Passenger Locator form online, where you disclose your address of stay, vaccination status, and all kinds of other things, and 3) book a day-2 PCR test with one of the recommended providers that UK government lists on their website. You cannot fill out the PL form without the receipt for the PCR that you had presumably already booked and paid for. The mandatory covid tests have become a massive racket, and one which makes no distinction between the UK citizens and foreign visitors, or vaccinated and unvaccinated passengers. A family of four, say, would need to pay a small fortune for eight tests on return to UK irrespective of its vaccination status – plus probably at least four tests for the country they’re visiting. I’ve read somewhere that the EU has capped the cost of these tests by private labs, but there’s no such limit in UK or Canada. PCRs are particularly expensive and can range from 45GBP to 200+. Most of them in UK work on the principle of ordering the kit, self-administering a sample, packaging and mailing or dropping off in designated drop off boxes. So here what I had to do:
- $40 antigen test at Shoppers Drug Mart. SDM are the best deal in town. Next up is the $60 antigen at Pearson, and others in labs around Toronto are more expensive. If you have to do a PCR in Canada before you can fly to a country, you’re seriously out of luck. I’ve seen labs in Yorkville advertising those for hundreds of dollars a pop if you want same-day results.
- Booked a Randox PCR test after I arrive in UK. With a BA discount, this came to 43 GBP.
- Filled out the memoir that is the Passenger Locator Form, entered the PCR receipt number.
- Printed my double AZ vaccination confirmations.
My flight landed at Heathrow, and bizarrely, nobody asked for any of this. Interesting thing about landing at Heathrow is that the airport divides passports into two separate tracks: the privileged passport track, if you’re coming from a high income or EU country, and the riff raff of the planet passport, which gets taken to a border official, is expected to have the required visas etc. This system, familiar to me from earlier, was still in place when I arrived there this Saturday. While there were signs all around us reminding us to fill out the PLF, and have vax and test confirmations ready, we entered the country at Heathrow the usual way: by scanning the passport at a machine which takes your photo and lets you in. What about all this work you put in? Apparently there’s sometimes possibility of a spot check. I saw no spot checks that day. Landing at Gatwick, Stansted or other airports of course might be entirely different; this is what happens at LHR.
A person who did ask me if I had vax documents and if I did the test was an Air Canada worker at the Pearson. She did not ask to see the proof, NB: she asked if I had those documents ready. And that was the extent of the checking. It appears that border officials rely on foreign and national airlines to do this kind of policing on their behalf? I expect that staffing requirements would otherwise be too onerous, and the processing way to slow. So, the AC staff at Pearson effectively took over some aspects of UK border and public health control.
Second thing that stands out is the stress of waiting for the day-2 PCR results which can potentially ruin your holiday and keep you forcefully quarantined in a foreign country. While I tossed and turned last night, wondering if my sweating was covid-related or if it’s just a particularly warm night, concocting in my head Plan B if my PCR turns positive and I had to scramble to find accommodation for ten days – I wondered what’s stopping people from sending someone else’s samples instead of their own. Do people cheat? Those who do will probably sleep better than I have last night. Most PCR tests arrive as kits to a UK address that you specified, and you either mail them back or drop them off to special boxes once you’ve taken your sample. There is no way to control whose sample a traveller is mailing in.
The traffic light system, as far as I can see, is in place to 1) make some people a lot of money, and 2) to put you off the idea of international travel, as a public health measure. Everybody hates it, the locals and the visitors. UK government is working on scrapping it, but it’s taking its sweet time. According to the Evening Standard, 1bn GBP was made on mandatory testing since it’s been introduced. Heathrow used to be the busiest airport in Europe, and it’s far down the list now.
Meanwhile, London is hopping. Masks are recommended in many places, and summarily ignored as nobody’s enforcing masking rules any more. I’ve seen very few masked waiters. Everything is open. Theatres, concert halls, restaurants, sports arenas. UK has about 30 000 new cases a day as of this writing, but nobody is particularly worried about it. Stiff upper lung? I enter a café Nero with a mask on and I’m the only one masked there. I wish I can explain that they won’t let me on the plane if I get the thing, otherwise I’d demask permanently too if I lived here. When I turned on the TV the other night, there was the Last Night at the Proms inside the packed Royal Albert Hall. All theatre shows have been playing to capacity, and people report this thing called the full capacity buzz.
I’m off tomorrow to a EU country and then a non-EU country, and should be back to UK within a week, to return to Canada on the last weekend in September. I will probably be tested four or five times in this journey? Each test is like unlocking a new level in a video game, where you can just as easily be taken out and made to restart.
And the airlines? They’re back to the usual bullshit. They overbook and fill every seat. They still serve reconstituted fake food. They clean and remove garbage left from previous flights possibly, maybe. Water taps at Pearson are still sensor-activated and trickle and drip instead of running; the garbage bins in its loos overflowing again. Gates E are still a dreadful place with restaurants selling dry sandwiches for $15, bombarding passengers with digital billboard messaging at every turn. Middle class people are still ferocious about their entitlement to overhead bin compartments, ask them about their two instead of one carry-on at your own peril. God I missed complaining about the awfulness of the airline industry. It’s good to be back at it.
This statue really is pants, isn’t it? Nothing about your observations re. the UK surprised me, it is so British. I went to London on the 4th of Sept, some people (I’d say most) were masked on the Tube, but above ground, many weren’t. Shame you don’t have more time in the UK, I’d love to buy you a coffee, either in London or Salisbury, if you fancied visiting the provinces (and see the site of Novichok attack😉, as well as the Cathedral). Hope that despite all the bureaucratic headaches you are enjoying your travels.