Island Mystery Highlights Uncoordinated U.K. Travel Quarantines

(Bloomberg) -- Thanasis Kontaris was stunned when the U.K. government blacklisted Serifos, advising against non-essential travel to the small Greek island, and asking residents and visitors returning to England to quarantine for two weeks.

“The total number of confirmed infections here has been in the single digits,” said Serifos’s sole permanent doctor. “I don’t know of any epidemiological data to support such decision.”

With a population of just several hundred people, Serifos has no airport or beach bars selling cheap booze. Its pristine shores are mostly free of sunbeds, and some of them are fairly empty even at peak season. Unlike many of the nearby popular islands, it never made headlines in Greece for its Covid-19 infections.

Yet, the few England residents visiting Serifos discovered without notice on Monday that they’ll have to self-isolate once they get back home, a requirement that could affect their work and family plans. The Netherlands followed with measures of its own on Tuesday, banning non-essential travel to all Greek islands, but not the mainland, even though most of Greece’s coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the country’s two biggest cities.  

The abrupt and uncoordinated demands add to the woes of the global travel industry and make moving around Europe a bigger headache for even the most ardent traveler.

For the U.K. holiday maker in particular, it deepens confusion that’s reigned since the first restrictions were announced in July. Wales, which sets it own rules, added six Greek islands — Serifos wasn’t initially among them — to its blacklist on Sept 3, marking the first time it broke with the rest of the U.K. and the first time another country’s islands were given a different designation from the mainland. While only England singled out Serifos, along with six other Greek islands, in Scotland the ban applies to anyone returning from anywhere in Greece.

U.K. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps sought to explain Monday’s move in the House of Commons.

“For the first time we have the data and capacity to add or remove specific islands from quarantine, whilst providing maximum protection to U.K. public health,” Shapps said. “Using our newly acquired JBC data, we are now in a position to remove Greek islands where holidaymakers are at risk of spreading new infections back home,” he said, referring to the country’s Joint Biosecurity Centre.

‘Very Unfortunate’

If there are any such data supporting the decision to blacklist Serifos, these aren’t known to locals. The lack of information sharing between governments and authorities and the public has been a major hurdle to global efforts to tame the spread of a pandemic that has wrecked havoc in the world’s economies.

“This is a very unfortunate decision and not warranted by the headline data,” Greek Tourism Minister Haris Theoharis said in an interview Tuesday with Sky News. “The Greek government has worked very closely with the U.K. Government, shared all data with them and increased testing in hot spots, where they feel they have reservations,” he said. Greece still remains one of the countries with the best track records for handling the pandemic, he said.

The Greek government only releases infection data at a regional level to avoid stigmatizing particular towns and protect privacy, but that approach has side-effects. The small social media community of Serifos was abuzz on Monday, with some commenting on Facebook that the U.K.’s decision suggests Greek authorities are “hiding something.”

Greeks and tourists alike can only deduce that an area is at high risk when authorities impose local restrictions, such as a midnight curfew for bars and restaurants. Serifos has never been subject to such measures, and the discrepancy between the Greek government’s assessment and the British decision to take action, which is meant to happen when the threshold of 20 cases per 100,000 is reached, exacerbates confusion and fuels rumors.

Kontaris, who trained in Stockholm, is fairly certain that if Serifos were a high risk area, he’d know. He points out that in the absence of airport, visitors leaving the island by ferry to the mainland, spend time in Athens, and only then fly to the U.K. So it’s more likely they caught the virus traveling than in Serifos, he says.

Still, the Greek capital, which authorities have singled out as the epicenter of the country’s pandemic, isn’t on the U.K. government’s blacklist. Nor are many Greek islands where the spread of infections had forced local authorities to impose mini lockdowns.

So how did the British government decide to put Serifos of all places on the quarantine list asks Kontaris. “Surely this is a mistake.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.