Government warns public not to book holidays over Covid fears – even in the UK

The Cabinet minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “people shouldn’t be booking holidays right now – not domestically or internationally”.

He went on: “The Prime Minister will say more about the route to unlocking this country, starting when he speaks about it on February 22.

“But we don’t know yet whether that will include information on things like holidays, simply because we don’t know where we’ll be up to in terms of the decline in cases, deaths, vaccination.

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“And not just the vaccination programme here, but the vaccination programme internationally, because people will be going outside of our borders.

“So it’s too soon.”

This comes after it was announced that travellers returning to the UK from countries on a ‘red list’ could face £10,000 fines and 10 year jail terms if they lie about where they have come from on their passenger locator forms.

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The ‘red list’ is intended to limit the spread of variants of Covid from other countries into the UK.

And anybody returning from those countries to England will have to pay £1,750 to stay in a ‘quarantine hotel’, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has confirmed.

Failing to quarantine in a designated hotel could result in a fine of between £5,000 and £10,000.

Yesterday the UK reported another 12,364 confirmed cases of coronavirus and a further 1,052 deaths within 28 days of a positive test. The total now stands at 113,850.

More than 12.6 million people have received a first dose of the vaccine.