Six months into Covid pandemic, the UK's isolation programme is still a mess | Anthony Costello
The government is asking people who may have coronavirus to isolate - but it has no idea of whether they're doing so
On 13 February, 83 British citizens left Arrowe Park hospital, Wirral, after 14 days of isolation, following their evacuation from Wuhan at the end of January. Two weeks was the appropriate quarantine response to potential contacts of a deadly new virus.
On the same day, a nurse in Brighton was asked to self-isolate by Public Health England. She had Covid-19 symptoms, and was astonished at PHE's response: she was sent home wearing a facemask, in a taxi with a driver without a mask. No advice was given about how to stop the spread of the virus. When she called NHS 111, she had to wait 15 hours to get a test. As she later told the Argus newspaper: I thought there would be a plan in place for something like this, but in my case, I know there wasn't one."
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