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Ignore the predictions of doom – now is not the time to stop travelling

beach - istock
beach - istock

After a brief post-lockdown respite over the summer, when borders reopened and mostly healthy Europeans scattered across the Continent to stretch their legs and bask in the sun, the gates are closing again.

More countries are today expected to join the Foreign Office’s ever-growing list of quarantined countries, Denmark and Iceland among them. How ironic that Sweden, the only nation to have refused a nationwide lockdown, is one of the few the UK now deems most safe to visit. Mounting evidence suggests that aiming for herd immunity over mass isolation wasn’t such a terrible idea.

For the rest of us, of course there was going to be a rise in cases once citizens were released from house arrest and started mingling both domestically and internationally again. It only goes to show how futile those months of lockdown really were.

This virus never went away, it merely rested on the sidelines. Spain is a good example; having had the most draconian lockdown in Europe, it is now dealing with the highest caseload. Surely we can all agree that denying people the right to leave their homes, as Spain did, even for fresh air or exercise, for months on end, only to then take the cork off and let Covid-19 flourish among citizens and holidaymakers alike was, in retrospect, a batty idea.

Coronavirus Spain Spotlight Chart - Cases default
Coronavirus Spain Spotlight Chart - Cases default

The hard truth is that Covid-19 picked off most of its at-risk victims during the first wave. And while deaths are slowly on the rise again everywhere, including in the UK, the rate is now roughly a tenth of what it was at the peak of the outbreak – and, overall, not much worse than what we’d expect from a bad flu season.

The fact that the number of Covid mortalities across Europe is currently so low, even though we’ve been mixing pretty freely for months, but that the number of cases is soaring, should be considered a positive. It proves that the more testing we do, the more asymptomatic cases we find, and the less harmful this virus evidentially is.

There’s a strong argument for allowing Covid-19 to circulate among the young and healthy, for letting them get back to their lives, and for freeing our economy from its shackles. Take it from Sweden: until we get a vaccine, the more people with naturally accumulated antibodies, the better.

Instead, our government is once again upping the restrictions and thus repeating a protocol that categorically did not work the first time, except to delay the inevitable. Worse, vast portions of the public are on board; many of them assuming the risks associated with the virus to be hugely higher than they are.

A mere 24 per cent of Europeans currently believe it is safe to travel at the moment, according to a Skyscanner’s recent New World of Travel report. It’s not just a shame that people are missing out on holidays for no good reason, it is ruining the lives and livelihoods of all those working in the tourism industry.

Those of us who are bold enough to board a plane currently have a one in 4,300 chance of catching Covid, according to the latest number crunching from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) statistician Arnold Barnett. Even in the extremely unlikely event that you do contract it, as long as you are not elderly of infirm, your chances of dying from it are well under one per cent.

The only upside to all this misplaced mass hysteria, assuming you don’t buy into it, is that travel these days is splendid. If you can, I’d urge you to make the most of it. I’ve been to Venice, Santorini and the Maldives since travel restrictions were lifted and found them all to be in a rare, beautiful, crowd-free state of tranquility.

Better still, the only other foreign visitors I did come across were fellow lockdown sceptics. They wouldn’t be travelling otherwise. What a blissful break from the paranoid, scornful curtain-twitchers back home.

For two months, significant numbers of us have been swapping germs with other Europeans; masks and social distancing measures notwithstanding. We’ve been catching the virus, sure, but we have not been dropping dead like flies as a result. The vast majority have suffered mild symptoms or none at all.

Now is not the time to be slamming stable doors again, though I won’t be surprised if we do see more of that in the coming months. Until then, I hope as many people as possible get to enjoy some form of holiday, and as many hospitality businesses scrape through because of it. It’s been six long months since the world collectively lost its mind. We deserve a break.