Recommendation 13

Not having any special border measures applicable to people arriving from Spain and France during March, and only having time-limited self-isolation measures for arrivals from Italy, therefore had a material effect on the number of cases circulating within the UK. Border measures in the UK were lifted rather than extended on 13 March at a time when the number of infections being imported from abroad was still rising. Evidence suggests that thousands of new infections in the UK resulted from cases arriving from Europe in the ten days between this decision and the introduction of lockdown on 23 March. The failure to have any special border measures during this period was a serious mistake that significantly increased both the pace and the scale of the epidemic in the UK, and meant that many more people caught COVID-19.