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We don’t have Covid, I am fairly confident. In fact, my wife and I had PCR tests just last month.
We needed them, to board a plane leaving Sri Lanka. And, indeed, to transit through the Middle East. Curiously, no paperwork was needed to arrive in plague-raddled England: in fact, even though Sri Lanka was, at that very moment, experiencing a quite marked uptick in infections (or discovery of same), the best news we had in the whole effortful business was that SL had just been added to the list of countries from which arrivals in the UK do not even have to isolate! This made the festive season – or what passed for it – a bit more manageable.
The “lockdown” regulations in the UK may not be anywhere as strict as critics would like; but given that we were coming from a tropical country where mask-wearing was basically compulsory, we were quite happy to behave ourselves with one-on-one walks, outdoor coffees, sticking to the constraints of our family “bubble”, etc. In the entire month that we were there, I shook the hand of just one man (his mother had died); and we also had to drive from Kent to Devon, to pick up half the family’s warm kit (“essential travel”).
We were, after all, only in the UK because there is no other way to get where we were going: to wit, the Falkland Islands.
The Falkland Islands Government (known as FIG), because it is a small place with limited resources, and because it has (or should have) strong connections to the travel industry, takes a straightforward line on Covid: all new arrivals spend two weeks in quarantine. And fair enough.
Given that most of the UK was Tier 4 by Christmas/New Year, in truth, if we were going to catch the lurgy anywhere, it would most likely be the 19-hour pseudo-military flight from Brize Norton to Mount Pleasant, via Dakar (where they changed crews just to keep things interesting).
And so we landed here a week ago, embussed (fresh masks, disposable gloves), debussed, entered our home, and have been inside these four walls (and garden fence) since.
https://thecritic.co.uk/quarantine-in-the-falkland-islands/