Hi there, I'm new to the Forum - my name is Steve and I live in Morges, Vaud. I started my job here in September 2020, and have a rented apartment. My family is in the UK so I planned to travel between the UK and Switzerland most weekends, or they would come to visit me. Of course it hasn't worked out that way and it is getting very difficult to travel at all now.

I would love to hear from anyone else in this situation, share experiences, and see how you are managing

I've cancelled 3 trips back to the UK in the last 10 months, and looking like I'll have to cancel April/May's too. Managed to see my family for 2 days in August, that's it and I'm totally losing the will to live

I'm in the same situation and haven't been back to Zurich since late December, so I feel your agony. I can only hope that with the vaccination campaign success and continued reduction in cases in CH, some sort of travel will be possible soon

Same here, I was planning to travel back the UK most weekends when I started my contract here. Now there are no direct flights from Zurich-Manchester at all, the only UK flight seems to be weekly Zurich-Heathrow and that is over a grand.

Hopefully Switzerland and the UK will be amongst the fastest vaccinating their populations so they can start flights again.

It wouldn't be so bad if the bars were open. Spending 7 days a week in an aparthotel drinking aldi booze is getting to me now.

Even if you can get a flight back to the UK, you would now have to quarantine in a hotel for 2 weeks at a cost of £1750

I know, it's mental.

I think you only need to do the hotel quarantine if you're travelling from a country on the red list, which Switzerland isn't on:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-q...ive-in-england

At the moment you have to quarantine for ten days, but it can be at a private home, and you need to take two tests.

The quarantine country lists seem so random. I have a colleague who just came back from Argentina: in the UK you need to do hotel-quarantine, but in Switzerland you don't need to quarantine at all.

It is confusing in the UK. England hotel quarantine is only for red list countries as you say. Quarantine in Scotland is for all countries. They may introduce border controls from England

Easyjet continue to fly from Geneva direct to Gatwick with flights from around 50-60 CHF. Not ideal if you want to fly ZRH to Manchester, especially once you factor in quarantine regulations. A look at Skyscanner shows you can fly ZRH-MAN with KLM for 200-300 CHF but it involves a change at AMS. And again, there's quarantine + testing certificates to include in the equation so unless you're planning on a trip of several weeks it's not really worth it. But it is possible.

The isolation continues to take its toll, physically and mentally.
For the more well-read and up-to-date than me: is there any hint so far on when Swiss quarantine for people coming in from the UK will cease?
I can’t seem to find any hint of an update on this.
The rates in the UK are dropping like a stone...

It won’t be announced until it is off the list. Unfortunately the U.K. going on the list was never about case numbers, but about the variants. South Africa went on the banned list at the same time as U.K. and its rates are very low, but it’s about stopping the SA variant arriving here.

There seems to be a lot of panic in the UK over the travellers who entered the UK from Brazil via Zürich on LX318. Yet strangely not much hype about this on Swiss media? I would’ve thought one would be worried about the remaining plane load of passengers that arrived with them into Zürich...

That flight was on the 10th of Feb.... but bloody late to worry about it now! I assume anyone just on the Brazil Zürich leg would have been required to do 10 days quarantine here?

One would hope they would quarantine... may not be the same in the UK given the lax enforcement of home quarantine ;-) I certainly agree it’s too late to worry! And not even sure if our worry about the variants is wholly justified in the first place - SA’s numbers remain very low despite the variant circling around over there! Brazil’s numbers are of course high but they’ve essentially done nothing about it throughout the pandemic....

The problem with the UK is how good they are at sequencing. According to the Economist the UK does more sequencing than the rest of the world put together, so it is inevitable that they will find the variants first, since no other country is really looking. Then they get named with a country tag, and that lends weight to the easy media narrative (at least in the UK) that travellers are the source of all infection, which probably means quarantine is here to stay. The same variants are developing entirely independently of each other around the world (again from the Economist this week) which means it isn't travellers that are necessarily causing the problems.

You’re quite right, I also read somewhere that the Uk does the highest rates of genome sequencing (half of all the ones that are being done, or something to that tune). If that is indeed true, then the fact that we have “only” found six cases (so far) must surely be comforting?! And yes, certainly suits the nationalistic narrative of the UK media.

I wasn't on that particular LX318, but I was on another LX318 the following week, and am now on day 10 of my quarantine period. I'm climbing the walls but will be allowed out tomorrow! Interestingly IATA did a study to find out exactly how many cases of COVID19 globally can be traced back to catching it on a plane. The answer was 44 out of 2.1 billion air passengers since the start of the pandemic. Flying is actually very safe it seems, air exchange 30 times per minute (same as in an operating theatre), all facing the same direction, seat backs in front of you means you're the equivalent of 7 metres apart from the person in front, plus now everyone will have had a negative Covid test too. And I agree, just because it's called the SA variant, doesn't mean it comes only from SA...

That’s really good that you managed to nip home for a visit! 10 days in quarantine must be so hard but worth being able to see your family, I’m sure. I’ve also been debating whether or not to pop over for a visit. Were the queues on arrival in Heathrow long? I read yesterday that people were waiting up to seven hours! Presumably that’s because they were checking every single detail of test results and the PLF form?

I was actually travelling every 2 weeks or so up until Christmas, then quarantine came back in because of these variants, so now i'm looking at monthly, Easter being the next planned trip. Queues at Heathrow for me have not been anything like that - 20/25 minutes wait maximum, sometimes I've walked straight through in less than 5 minutes. There's more checking of paperwork now, but that was pretty efficient for those who had everything done in advance. I have no idea what can have happened on Sunday to cause those delays, but it makes a good headline, so i guess the papers won't want to go into the reasons too deeply otherwise it would spoil the story...