Heathrow Airport is refusing requests for extra flights from India before the country is added to the Government’s coronavirus red list at 4am tomorrow due to fears of long border queues.
Four airlines asked the west London airport for a total of eight extra flights to arrive at the hub before the Friday deadline so that returning UK travellers can avoid the gruelling 10-day hotel quarantine.
It comes after MailOnline revealed this week that India’s troublesome Covid variant has been spotted more than 200 times in Britain, after Matt Hancock said more than 100 cases had been detected on Monday.
Yesterday India reported a global record of 314,000 new cases after premier Narendra Modi said the subcontinent’s health system was being overwhelmed by a coronavirus ‘storm’. The surge in cases of the new variant prompted Boris Johnson to cancel his planned trip to the Asian nation this week.
It is feared B.1.617 spreads easier than older strains and has mutations which help it evade vaccines – but to what degree remains unclear. Scientists do not believe it is any deadlier than the strains currently circulating in Britain.
Doctors in India claim there has been a sudden spike in coronavirus admissions among people under 45, who have traditionally been less vulnerable to the disease.
London Heathrow’s refusal to allow extra flights from India was reported earlier by the BBC, with the airport adding that it turned down the requests from four carriers requesting to operate an additional eight flights from India because of concerns about queues at passport control.
Airport officials also told Reuters news agency that they did not want to exacerbate existing pressures at the border by allowing even more passengers to fly in.
MailOnline understands a maximum of 20 of the 40 passport control desks at Heathrow Terminal 2 are currently being manned because of social distancing. Staff are also in small bubbles because of Covid-19, preventing groups being deployed when the border becomes busy.
The Civil Aviation Authority confirmed that it also received applications for charter flight permits from India to the UK – but these had been declined or withdrawn as they did not meet the qualifying criteria.
A Government spokesperson said: ‘We are in a global health pandemic – people should not be travelling unless absolutely necessary. Every essential check helps avoid the risk of importing dangerous variants of coronavirus which could put our vaccine rollout at risk.’
People coming out of Heathrow Terminal 2 after arriving back from Mumbai before the new restrictions come into force
A healthcare worker wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) collects a nasal swab sample from a man for a Covid-19 rapid antigen testing along the street in New Delhi
An average of 1,411 deaths was recorded over the past seven days in India, its highest rate throughout the pandemic
Passengers arrive at Heathrow Terminal 2 from Mumbai as travel agents warn of a desperate scramble to beat Friday’s quarantine deadline
India is currently battling a second wave of cases, but the numbers per capita are nowhere near levels seen during the UK’s winter peak
The UK’s hugely successful vaccination programme and brutal four-month lockdown has squashed deaths to double-digits. But India’s fatalities have started to climb on the back of a spike in infections
Travellers are seeking to fly back to Britain before the enforced quarantine comes into effect, with currently 30 flights a week operating between the two nations as the new variant wreaks havoc.
Earlier this week the Department for Transport (DfT) announced that India would be added to the red list because of rising cases and a new variant.
Since then, online travel agent Skyscanner said searches for flights returning to the UK from India had increased by more than 250 per cent.
No10’s travel ban has sparked a ‘desperate frenzy’, with families trying to beat the Friday deadline and avoid having to quarantine in a hotel. Travel agents say that a standard £400 economy ticket from India to the UK has soared to £2,000 due to a shortage of seats on planes over the next three days.
Sixteen direct flights from India – which carried about 300 passengers each before airlines brought in social distancing guidelines – were scheduled to land in the UK between the announcement of the ban and the deadline coming into action. Thousands more will travel on in-direct routes.
Suresh Kumar, chairman of Indra Travel, told The Telegraph most Britons trying to return are in India on emergency visas for family funerals or weddings or on business, as well as students.
Universities warned that the travel ban would leave 10,000 international students scrambling to return to UK campuses before Friday.
Vivienne Stern from Universities UK told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the current capacity of quarantine hotels cannot hold all the students expected to return to the country.
She said the Government had not yet made it clear if more hotels would be allowed to open rooms for them. Applications from India next year are up 25 per cent and universities are worried quarantining could put off current students.
When the new rules come into effect, anyone arriving in England or Scotland from India will need to stay in a quarantine hotel for 10 days and follow a strict coronavirus testing regime at their own expense. There are currently no direct international flights from India into Wales or Northern Ireland.
In England, a stay in one of the hotels costs £1,750 per passenger travelling alone – including transport, tests, food and accommodation.
Every additional adult, or child over 12, must pay £650, while children aged five to 12 pay £325.
MailOnline understands the long delays are being caused by a perfect storm of problems with the Home Office accused of using a ‘rigid and inflexible’ bubble system for staff meaning those not on the rota for passport control cannot be moved in to ease pressure at peak times, despite social distancing and regular sanitising.
Huge queues are being made worse because electronic-gates cannot be used because the Government is yet to fully digitise the ‘passenger locator forms’, which travellers must fill in before heading to the UK.
Unions claim Heathrow could use all passport control desks if they had installed screens surrounding each booth, rather than the front-facing ones they chose. But they also blame passengers for failing to fill in the right forms with birder staff they are seeing large numbers of people using fake covid test certificates that are not properly checked by airlines.
Lucy Moreton, of the Immigration Services Union, said: ‘The Government should put more pressure on airlines to make sure that all the documents are there and correct before people fly. Why are these people boarding without the carrier making sure they have the documentation they need? It would not solve it, but it would make the queues shorter’.
The most up-to-date data from the Government’s official coronavirus variant tracking programme shows 103 infected people have had the mutant strain.
But separate figures published by the same group of experts show the B.1.617 variant has actually been spotted 215 times – with it making up around one in every 200 positive swabs that are analysed.
Scientists said it was a ‘very troubling’ number and that it was proof the variant was spreading, with 85 per cent of samples detected in the past month.
However, health chiefs say some of the cases will be duplicates because the majority are linked to foreign travel. Everyone flying in to England from India – and anywhere abroad – currently has to take two Covid tests while quarantining at home for 10 days. British experts are currently managing to sequence the majority of positive tests because cases are so low.
The development comes after other scientists and senior Labour politicians slammed the Government for allowing thousands of travellers from India to pour into the UK every week despite knowing about the variant for nearly a month.
No10 only announced India was being added to the UK’s travel red list yesterday, and the measures don’t start until 4am on Friday. At least 5,000 of people are due to arrive in Britain from India before the travel restrictions come into effect, as a desperate scramble to beat the quarantine deadline ensues.
Amid growing numbers of the variant at home and the spiralling epidemic in India, the Prime Minister has had to cancel a scheduled visit to Delhi next week.
Reacting to the new Indian variant cases, Professor Paul Hunter, an epidemiologist from the University of East Anglia, added: ‘It does look like this is growing rather more quickly than it should be while we’re in this sort of lockdown.
The Covid variants circulating in the UK
A health worker collects a swab from a policeman in Bhopal, the capital city of India’s Madhya Pradesh state
Health workers rest in between cremating virus victims in Delhi amid the huge surge in infections and deaths
An elderly woman waits to receive a vaccine in Delhi where hospitals are running perilously low on oxygen
Burning pyres of patients who died of Covid-19 at a crematorium in Delhi over the weekend. The city of 29 million people has fewer than 100 beds with ventilators, and fewer than 150 beds available for patients needing critical care
Relatives wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) walk amid burning funeral pyres as they perform last rites for covid-19 victims in Bhopal
‘It is still a little bit early to know what’s really going on with this variant, but the signs are not looking good.’
The data, published by the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium, shows the Indian variant has been spotted in every part of the UK except Northern Ireland – with 198 samples in England, 10 in Scotland and seven in Wales.
Professor Hunter said it was ‘almost certain’ that there are more cases of the Indian variant because it can take two or three weeks for sequences to be analysed and published.
There have been anecdotal reports from medics that young people make up two third of new patients in Delhi. In the southern IT hub of Bangalore, under-40s made up 58 percent of infections in early April, up from 46 percent last year.
There is still no proof younger people are more badly affected by the new strain.
As Britons scramble to get back to the UK, travellers have complained of two-hour queues at border control at Heathrow Airport, where five flights from India are due to arrive today.
Labour slammed the Government for not banning arrivals immediately despite the Indian variant being under investigation by UK officials for almost three weeks. Sir Patrick Vallance’s predecessor admitted ministers were too slow to respond to the new B.1.617 strain claiming the ban was ‘taken a bit too late in truth’.
The PM is facing growing calls to ease lockdown quicker after the number of deaths continues to fall and the jab drive hit the milestone of fully vaccinating 10million Brits. A total of 33m have had at least one injection.
The Indian variant was first identified internationally in October and detected in the UK on February 22. Two key mutations set it apart from others – named E484Q and L452R – with both of them found on the ‘spike’ that the virus uses to latch onto human cells.
These are not thought to be key mutations of any of the other variants on Public Health England’s list, but have appeared in virus samples before.
Those alterations are thought to make the virus more transmissible, and lab studies suggest it can escape antibodies – a key part of the body’s Covid immune response. But because the E484Q mutation is rare, scientists aren’t sure to what degree it will change the way the virus behaves.
Meanwhile, it emerged today that around 100 people are trying to enter the country each day with a ‘fake Covid certificate.
The fake documents claiming a traveller has a recent negative test result are ‘very easy’ to forge, MPs on a cross party committee on Covid were told. And there is no way to tell how many more are being missed.
Lucy Moreton, professional officer for the Immigration Services Union (ISU), which represents border immigration and customs staff in the UK, also said there is ‘little to no’ evidence on how well people are adhering to quarantine rules.
Ministers want Heathrow to dedicate a terminal to passengers arriving from red list countries amid fears the airport has become a Covid ‘breeding ground’.
The Home Office is keen for Terminal 4 – which has been shut since last year – to process travellers from coronavirus hotspots with troublesome virus variants.
Officials are bracing for a huge influx of red list arrivals after India was added due to the emergence of a new variant and spiking infections in the country.
Up to 5,000 passengers are expected to fly back to the UK over the next 48 hours as part of the rush to beat Friday’s 4am deadline, after which British nationals arriving from India will need to isolate in a quarantine hotel at their own expense.
No10 wants Heathrow to prevent red list arrivals from mixing with passengers from low risk countries, with travellers complaining of queues of up to six hours with little social distancing.
Between 8,000 and 10,000 passengers are pouring into the airport each day, with up to 1,000 thought to be from countries already on the red list.
Heathrow shut terminals 3 and 4 – primarily for long-haul and European travel – last May during the first national lockdown, with all flights being redirected to terminals 2 and 5. It has led to thousands of passengers from high and low risk countries being funneled into the same arrival and departure lounges.
Rules at border control also mean every passenger has to show forms proving which country they’ve come from and their reasons for visiting the UK.
Ms Moreton said it had led to arrivals from red, amber and green countries mixing in a confined space for hours. Asked if this meant it was a breeding ground for infection, Ms Moreton told MPs: ‘Yes, very much so.
‘When it’s so slow and the queues are so bad, then absolutely it’s a significant risk to the border force staff that are doing it, and to the travellers that are standing in those queues.’
E-gates are still shut and every form needs to be checked by hand, which has slowed the rate at which staff can process passengers.
It comes as India grapples a troublesome new variant, with an oxygen tank leaking outside a hospital on Wednesday and killing 22 critically ill patients after their supply was shut off.
An oxygen tanker leaked outside an Indian hospital, killing 22 Covid-19 critically ill patients after their supply was shut off. Pictured: Firefighters arrive on the scene wearing protective gear
Officers were seen thrashing locals with sticks and forcing them to perform sit-ups and press-ups in the street in Chattarpur
Relatives wearing PPE attend the funeral of a man who died from Covid disease at a crematorium in New Delhi
All of the victims were on ventilators and in need of constant oxygen supply at the Zakir Hussain Hospital’s Covid ward in the western city of Nashik when the supply was disrupted for around 30 minutes.
Hospital staff across the country have been warning they will run out of oxygen as the health system collapses around them amid a surge in cases which has seen India register a record 2,023 deaths in one day.
It comes as the country’s police were caught humiliating Covid rule-breakers with draconian physical punishments
Officers were seen thrashing locals with sticks and forcing them to perform sit-ups and press-ups in the street in Chattarpur as authorities struggled to contain the deadly new variant which appears to be affecting younger people.
India has been in the grips of a second wave of infections blamed on lax government rules and the new ‘double mutant’ B.1.617 strain, adding almost 3.5million new cases this month alone.
As the oxygen tanker leaked at the Zakir Hussain hospital, which is a dedicated Covid-19 medical facility, panic ensued among the patients, their families and staff.
Video footage from outside of the hospital shows the gas leaking from the tanker and dense white clouds covered the area. The fire service arrived at the scene and sprayed water to control the leak.
‘As per current information, 22 people have died due to the interrupted supply of oxygen at the Zakir Hussain municipal hospital,’ district collector Suraj Mandhare told NDTV .