Thanks everybody.
Dally kola, your expérience described above about ordering day 2 and 8 tests was with rkdiagnostics?
That seems to be efficient and also the cheapest. £79 for the 2 tests including postage?
Looks like a better deal than Randox.
No problems with self-testing?
Sorry, it’s rtdiagnostics
I just had a look. Out of stock!
For info: Re flights Mme departed for Stansted Tue - ryanair. 7 passengers. 6 flight attendants. Presumably 2 pilots. Just before it left skyscanner had the seats at 3 euro.
The flights for the next two weeks have now disappeared from skyscanner. I believe Leary had a go at Johnston. Cue a new topic?
‘Good grief, I agree with Michael Kevin O’Leary’
British airways are offering 4 flights per day from Nice to Heathrow. Pretty unlikely all those flights will actually happen. Who would fly to the UK right now apart from people like me with dying relatives over there?
It just seems so totally ridiculous that I, coming from France where the covid levels are very low now, must suffer all these ridiculous controls, while everybody is out and about in the UK, potentially spreading their strange covid variants.
Come on, if the French government inflicted this on the French, they would try and do something about it!
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I just found an article on internet that says:
“The UK government has said it will update the travel lists every three weeks, following an evaluation of the Covid-19 risk posed by different countries.
The most recent update took place on 3 June, meaning the next review should take place on 24 June.”
I will travel to the UK on 23 June. If France becomes a green country on 24th, do you think I’ll be able to abandon my quarantining? Or only people who leave France after 24th?
Any guesses whether France will become green? It certainly should, but something tells me it won’t.
At present two developments could be on the cards which will ease France->UK travel.
The first is that France could be put on the green list. With cases < 3k/day and steadily falling plus a vaccination programme still in full swing it would be logical to consider the country low risk.
The other possibility is that the UK could allow travel to, or rather, return from amber countries without quarantine for those who have been fully vaccinated - this announcement might be made at the same time as the next review but doesn’t particularly have to be.
The dark cloud on the horizon however is that France or the EU might decide that the UK is too full of Delta variant and put us on the red list - at that point UK->France travel will be impossible without a compelling reason.
Apparently 22nd July is a key date as that’s when Parliament breaks for summer recess? And presumably MP’s will also want to go on holiday
Ah, 22 july is the day before I fly…
Perhaps I should start by only buying the day 2 test.
UK Covid-19 tests for travelling.
Link below, article contains price comparisons and discount code details.
I thought I better give you an update about my trip to the UK. Firstly, I don’t recommend travelling to the UK yet if you can avoid it. At check-in at the airport in France, they asked to see my covid test result and locator form. If I hadn’t had a bag to check-in, I don’t know if these things would have been controlled. (the pre-departure test is an antigen test free with carte vitale possible without reservation in many pharmacies). At French immigration they warned me that as a British citizen I will need to show proof of my carte de séjour application when I come back into France.
Arrival at Heathrow using automatic passport control, absolutely nothing was controlled.
You get called once a day during quarantine, but you can give a mobile phone number. Best to keep your phone close to you. I doubt there are any physical controls.
For the day 2 and day 8 tests I used Randox self-testing, this company seems to be efficient and one of the cheapest. £43/test with a BA coupon code. I’ve no idea if the test results are actually transmitted to the government, I guess probably not, only if by chance you test positive.
Be prepared for a certain level of frustration, it’s quite ridiculous that arrivals from France (with low covid levels) are being treated as dangerous people while Britain is the covid capital of Europe once again. Either the government are suffering from “crazy covid paranoia disease”, or they just want to help the UK economy by making Brits holiday in the UK this summer. Also I can see a certain mentality here that perhaps explains why so many people voted Brexit - a sort of English nationalism where the attitude is “we English are ok even with un-controllable covid, but we must be wary of those foreigners (even if their covid levels are low)”.
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Sorry, just had to reply to your comment about why so many people voted Brexit. Where we lived you couldn’t get a job because employers only wanted super fantastic eastern Europeans. Single people couldn’t get social housing because the super fantastic eastern Europeans seemed to be prioritised. There was also more pressure on doctors and dentists. Don’t get me wrong, Brexit was clearly a bad idea but it might have been avoided if people had actually addressed some of the real problems rather than saying leavers were stupid racists.
I assume from the rest of your comment the real problem to be addressed is the incredible laziness of some British people?
No Kirstea it is just a simple matter of equality. The eastern Europeans are just the same as the British, some are super fantastic, some are dreadful, most are somewhere in the middle. Even last year when I was sort of furloughed and could have worked for free at the local fruit farm they wouldn’t have me because I couldn’t live in. Oddly the jobs were advertised to Europeans at 8 euros an hour way below the minimum wage in the UK.
But I don’t understand how that relates to what you said? It seems like you’re taking your personal experiences and ideas and trying to build a factual case for what is happening everywhere in every situation which just makes no sense. Anyway, it doesn’t bother me either way, but the real problems I saw were not the foreign workers doing jobs that on the whole no one else wanted to do. But as I say, it matters not to me now I’m away from all of that.
Was it the fault of immigration or the fault of poor investment I’m health and dental services? And poor implementation of labour laws leaving some of them exploited? Brexit was posed as an easy answer to complicated questions.
Also if the eastern Europeans took all the jobs off the British why are there now shortages of farm workers?
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Which is illegal. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but it is illegal. In any case I thought the usual scam was to pay them the correct rate but then charge for accommodation etc, usually poorly maintained as a way of reducing their wage in practice.
I’m not sure why you think that, had the EU workers not been there there would miraculously be jobs at proper rates of pay for locals though.
Sorry I knew I shouldn’t have expressed an opinion. I can only relate my experiences. The point I was trying to make is that you can’t change people’s minds unless you understand their motivations.
A significant part of that motivation is the decades of propaganda pumped into their brains by the right wing press though, an education campaign would do just as much good, but it would be fighting against the might of Murdoch, DMGT and the right, which would be a very difficult war to wage, as it was over the EU. When you’ve got The Sun blaming every bad decision of the UK government on the EU, it gets difficult to correct those lies. That’s as much what is needed, correction of much of the blatant lies around foreign workers.
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Which is fine - my point was that if you have unscrupulous employers you have a separate problem and the presence of EU workers a sympton, not a cause.
True but you seem to have also fallen into the trap of blaming “Eastern Europeans” for “taking UK jobs” when it is not at all clear that jobs would be available or that UK workers would want them.
You also seem to have fallen for the “taken all our housing” myth - there is no prioritisation for migrant workers in getting council accommodation so you’d really need to provide evidence if you are going to make that claim.
I don’t deny the problems - well, apart from heath tourism for which there was very little evidence that it was a significant problem. The issue I have is blaming EU workers or the EU for the problems in housing, health or education (I don’t think you made that claim in this thread but “taking all the school places” definitely came up pre-referendum).
UK Fruit growers have tried recruiting UK workers and drawn a blank in many instances; some have given up and stopped growing fruit, more will follow suit.
Now you can question the validity of a system where supermarkets will not pay growers enough for their product so that it can be produced profitably and UK workers paid at least UK minimum wage to pick it - but, and it’s a but the Leavers did not understand, EU membership did not cause the problem and leaving the EU will not fix the problem.
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Pre referendum no factory jobs, post referendum factory jobs available. Same with social housing. Don’t disagree that EU wasn’t the problem but you would be hard pressed to convince locals who do want jobs that voting leave was wrong. The problem was that all British workers were called lazy and useless and this wasn’t true and wasn’t fair. I agree it is a British problem we were totally out of step with the EU.