‘Clarity needed’ over risk to NI from internal UK travel

The advice, from Northern Ireland’s chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride and chief scientific advisor Professor Ian Young, was given to Health Minister Robin Swann, BBC News NI report.

Ministers are set to review international travel restrictions today.

A Department of Health statement said: “The Health Minister said that decisions around travel restrictions is a matter for the Executive and he wants to see this resolved at the next meeting on Thursday.

“The department would have no comment to make on the content of Executive papers.”

Alliance MLA Paula Bradshaw, a member of the Stormont health committee, said: “I submitted an Assembly Question last month to query why, for the past month, we have been officially asking people arriving from parts of Europe with low or even no transmission of the virus to quarantine, while at the same time not even checking arrivals from England where transmission has remained among the highest in Europe.”

She continued: “It has been obvious for some time we should at least be using some of our tracing network and testing capacity to check arrivals into Northern Ireland from England, given the infection rate is evidently so much higher there.

“It is peculiar scientific evidence backing this up has only been revealed now, when it must have been available a month ago.”