Nigeria on UK list of countries to face 10-day £1,500 isolation

 British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, will any moment from now publish a list of up to 30 'high risk' Covid countries where returning travellers will be forced to quarantine in hotels for 10 days.

Nigeria, Brazil, South Africa and Kenya are expected to be on this list according to British newspapers.

The new measure requiring visitors to be isolated for 10 days at a total cost of £1,500 is being introduced following concerns about new Covid variants entering Britain.

Nigerian passengers arriving in Britain will be isolated for 10 days in hotels near airports and pay around £1,500 (about N800,000) for the privilege. The same rule applies to passengers arriving Britain from the other 29 listed countries.

Airlines are expected to assist to ensure full compliance and will be fined if they fail to enforce non-exemptions properly.  

Other 'high risk' countries, due to be published later today may include Portugal, Kenya, Ethiopia, much of South America and southern Africa.    

British officials say these areas have been chosen because of dangerous variants that have emerged there - or because they have rocketing infection and death rates.

Travellers to UK may be forced to pay N800k for 2-week stay in quarantine hotels

 

Travellers to the UK could be forced to pay for their own two-week stay in quarantine hotels as government officials mull new plans to stop new variant of Covid-19 from entering the UK.

The system reportedly being discussed with some hotel groups is already in operation in Australia. It will see new arrivals in the UK staying in their hotel rooms for up to a fortnight at their own cost.

This arrangement may cost travellers up to £1,500 (about N800,000).

The UK Daily Mail reports that the British government dreads a situation that a new Covid-19 variant that is resistant to the currently available vaccines may be imported.

Similar systems have been used in Australia, which recorded just 204 new Covid-19 cases in the last 14 days, and New Zealand, which recorded just 81 cases in the last fortnight.

The Australian Government initially covered the quarantine hotel costs at the start of the pandemic.

But those entering Australia since July have been forced to pay up to £1,500 for the two-week quarantine stay in some parts of the country.

Designated quarantine hotels apply strict Covid-19 protocols, including kitting their staff in full Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

Currently all travellers coming to the UK must provide a negative test before travel, before isolating for up to 10 days at a fixed address. They can leave if they test negative after five days.

London City Airport isn’t duty-free shopping compliant

Folks, if you want tax refund for your shopping in London, don’t fly out through London City Airport. 

The airport has no facility to process your tax refund. All they have is a box where you are expected to dump your duty-free shopping forms. 

If you have already booked for your flight, then go through the trouble of processing the refund at the appropriate offices in London ahead of your flight. Let the customs put their stamp and then you can dump in the box provided at London City Airport. Perhaps, they will get back to you with your refund.

Otherwise, kiss your refund goodbye.

Na wa for my countrymen o!

Why is it that it is your countrymen that tries to rip you off at every opportunity they get? Our last holiday in London went without any incident except when we transacted business with our own countrymen.

With other nationals, you would be sold stuff and be given receipt where they had the facility without you having to ask. Sometimes, when you were frustrated with the numerous coins in your wallet, you just dumped them on the table and asked the shop owner or sales clerk to pick the correct value of money for the stuff you bought. They would just do that, push the balance towards you and proceed to show you and explain what they took out of the lot.

On the contrary, our experience with a Nigerian cuisine restaurant, Tasty African, Maryland, Stratford, was that there was always a scheme to nick one or two pounds off you. The same items were sold at different prices every time we visited. We discovered this and started insisting on them giving us receipts for our purchases and a couple of times, the sales girl would feign forgetfulness.

If they had told you some prices for some items when you were picking stuff, once you tell them you wanted receipt, they started giving you different prices for the same items.

Sometimes when you remembered how much they sold something the previous day and ask why the difference, the sales girl would tell you, how, that must have been hard chicken. ‘This one is soft chicken!’

We found their food much better than the other restaurants we had used and our schedule was to tight that we couldn’t look for new restaurants. So, unfortunately, we had to keep going back.

The owner of that business needs to pay attention to his sales staff in that outlet particularly.

Fear of flying in Nigeria

The gentleman who sat by my side on an Arik flight from Abuja to Lagos  on Monday registered himself with me as a grouchy old man.

He would not respond to greetings. Even when I offered to help him reach up to the baggage hold to keep his suit holder (he is short), he just looked at me as if I was not there, and continued to struggle. I concluded he was a frustrated fellow and left him alone.

For the entire flight he looked like one fed up with life, even though he accepted the inflight snack and ate it with aplomb.

The moment our flight touched down, this same gentleman turned to me and shared a joke, smiling broadly. I had to look around to be sure I was the one he was talking to. I was.

I took another look at this man, and he was literally lit up with smiles all over. Then, it hit me. He had nothing against me. His grouchy behaviour of the previous 40 minutes was his own way of dealing with the terror of flying in a Nigerian commercial plane post Associated Airlines crash.

Stowaway man falls from plane's landing gear

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A man is believed to have fallen to his death from thousands of feet in the sky when a British Airways plane he was hiding in dropped its landing gear on approach to Heathrow Airtport.

Police believe the man is in his 30s and of North African descent. He could have fallen from about 2000 feet in the sky, landing on a car in a plush London suburb under the Heathrow flight path.

Aviation experts say he was probably dead before he hit the ground either because he had been crushed by the retracting landing gear shortly after the plane took off or because of the extreme cold at high altitude.

It is thought the man’s body dropped from the aircraft undercarriage as the plane came in to land.

Residents on the tree-lined road in Mortlake, on the south bank of the Thames less than ten miles from the airport, yesterday spoke of their shock on finding the body after hearing a loud bang.

Billy Watson, 26, a security guard who lives opposite where the man fell, said he saw the body ‘all twisted up’.

He said: ‘It is unbelievable. The first thing I thought when I saw the body was that it must have fallen from quite a height.

‘You could tell by the way his body was mangled. There was a big pool of blood coming from his head.’

Last night, others said they were amazed blood could still be seen on the family street. Catherine Lambert, a mother of two, said it was ‘disgusting’ that the scene had not been cleared up.

‘It’s shocking you can still see splatters of blood,’ she said, adding that the body was left uncovered by police for ‘a good few hours’ after it was found.

She said: ‘We just wonder what made him get in that plane and want so badly to escape.’ Another resident, who did not wish to be named, said: ‘No one saw him fall because it was early on a Sunday morning.

‘Whatever he was trying to escape from must have been horrendous to make him do that.’

Richard Taylor, of the Civil Aviation Authority, said a stowaway in an aircraft undercarriage was unlikely to have survived as he would either be crushed by the wheels after take-off or freeze in temperatures as low as minus 40C (minus 40F).

He said: ‘The chances of survival for a stowaway are very slim, particularly in the recess of the landing gear.

‘I don’t know of anyone who has survived being stowed away on a long-haul flight.

‘When the landing gear comes down at the other end, a few miles from the runway and about 2,000ft in the air, if there is a person who had died they would fall out.’

Police said they were investigating whether the body was that of a stowaway.’

The discovery comes just over a fortnight after the body of a stowaway was found in the landing gear recess of a BA plane arriving at Heathrow from Cape Town.