Brexit / Covid-19

I am British. I don't think I've ever been "proud" of that as such, but these days I regard it as more of a challenge to be dealt with than something to be pleased about.

I would very happily associate myself with being Irish, German, Swedish, New Zealand or Canadian (and, to a lesser extent, South African), but being British is not something I can feel good about any more.

I live part of the time in England and part of the time in Germany (because I have a house in England, and some of my family lives there, and I have a girlfriend and a dog in Germany).

• Update November 2020: the dog no longer exists

In the middle of 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union. I voted to stay.

Over the next 3½ years, the British government resisted all attempts & requests to hold a second referendum (which many people thought was a good idea, since the electorate might in the meantime have worked out what the effects of leaving the EU might actually be, and might have decided that they didn't want that after all), and by January 31st 2020 (with several postponements of the fateful day, because Britain couldn't actually work out what it wanted to do instead of being in the EU), Britain left the European Union.

I am also an Open Source geek, and I have been attending Fosdem for many years. This always takes place on the weekend of the first Sunday in February.

So, on Friday 31st January 2020, I drove from my house in England to Dover, got on a ferry to Calais, and drove through a little bit of France and about half of Belgium, to Brussels, where Fosdem always takes place.

At that time I was thinking that Brexit was going to be something of a challenge for me in the next few months - I live for a large part of the year in Germany, and I was now no longer a European citizen. Germany had already made it possible for other EU nationals to get dual nationality, but with certain qualifying factors, and due to my personal circumstances (being self-employed in the UK, having no German employer, paying British tax but not German tax, paying into a British pension scheme but not a German one, for example), it would have been both difficult and expensive (getting multiple UK banking, tax and pension documents officially translated into German, and also demonstrating my likelihood of continuing to earn a self-employed income, for example) to meet the requirements for acquiring German nationality.

(Now that Brexit has finally "happened", I can still do this if I wish to, and become German, but under German law I can no longer keep my British (non-European) nationality as well, so I can no longer get dual nationality - that was only a possibility whilst Britain was a European country. Of course becoming German and no longer being British could give me some problems with living in Britain and running a business there.)

Anyway, back to January 31st 2020…

I arrived in Brussels and checked into my hotel, attended Fosdem for the next two days, and drove on to my apartment in Germany.

I normally drive back and forth between the two countries around 6 times a year, sometimes on my own, sometimes with the dog, and sometimes with both the dog and the girlfriend (depending on her holidays from work).

In the first week of March 2020 I went, as I have annually for about the past 15 years, to Hintertux in Austria with a group of skiing friends, and enjoyed a good week's exercise.

One week after our return, Tirol closed due to Covid-19.

From that point on, my life (and, indeed, many other people's) has not been the same since.

I have seen my 96-year old mother (who lives in England) once since January 2020 (I write this in March 2021, still with no prospect of seeing her any time soon).

I have visited my house, and garden, also once in that time, for 3 weeks in July / August 2020 (and I can tell you, the garden needed attacking with a vengeance after having last been seen in January, just before driving to Brussels).

My longer-term concerns regarding Brexit have been alleviated since the Germans have worked out that they will give me an Aufenthaltsdokument (an official permit to remain long-term resident in Germany), although this is small comfort compared to not being able to travel back and forth between my two residences in England and Germany (both need maintenance, both are pleasant to visit, and both have family and friends nearby) due to the Covid-19 travel restrictions.

I recently received (whilst in Germany) an invitation to make an appointment with my local (in England) doctor's surgery for a Covid-19 vaccination.

I asked them whether I could get travel permission to get there to get the vaccination: "No."

I asked them whether getting the vaccination itself qualified as a "medical appointment" for being temporarily allowed out of quarantine: No.

I asked them whether, having had the vaccination, I could then travel freely between my two residences without quarantine; "We don't know."

I asked them what documentary evidence they would give me once I'd had the vaccination, so I could prove to anyone else that it had been done: We don't.

So, I find myself wondering, what is the point? If people cannot travel freely once they have had the vaccination, does this mean it doesn't work? If they don't give you something to prove that you've been vaccinated, why is anyone going to believe it?

I also find myself wondering about the UK's current quarantine regulations - apparently I would have to stay at home for 10 days after arriving, and also have two Covid-19 tests during those 10 days. What is the point of the first test??? If the second test says "you have Covid-19", then the first test result is meaningless. If the first test says "you have" and the second test says "you haven't", then either the first result is meaningless, or the second one is. Either way, two tests are meaningless.

I finally managed to return to the UK, and visit my house, my garden and my mother, for the first time in 13 months, in September 2021. It took 3 days to get the garden into a state where I could walk from one end to the other. The front garden had grown so many nettles and brambles that the postman had started delivering my post to my neighbours, simply because he couldn't get to my front door without injury.

I'm grateful for his initiative.

However, everything official regarding Covid-19 for that visit was a farce.

1. We were required to get a certificate of a negative test within 72 hours prior to travelling.
   • We went to our local doctor in Germany and asked him to do a Lateral Flow Test. He said the results were only valid for 24 hours, but he didn't mind administering the tests anyway and charging us €25 each for sticking a swab up our noses, swilling into a some liquid and then waiting 15 minutes to see whether 1 or 2 lines appeared.
   • When we arrived at border control, we showed them the certificates he had written by hand and signed, and they accepted them, with no way whatsoever of validating whether this was a genuine German doctor. He had even given me a blank form when I first asked whether he could do the tests, in order to make sure that the form I ended up with would contain all the details required. I could easily have simply copied the form, filled it in myself, and added what might look like a German doctor's signature.
2. The French required us to fill in a form which basically says "I promise that I don't feel unwell, and that I haven't met anyone known to have Covid-19 within the past 10 days".
3. The border control authorities also asked to see our proof of vaccination status.
   • I don't like keeping things like that on a mobile phone (it can run out of power, get dropped, left behind, or stolen) and the official paper versions are two sheets of A4, which is not in my opinion convenient to carry around with you. Therefore I had scanned the (extremely large) QR code on my official vaccination document and extracted the text of it (without the digital signature), re-encoded this into a (smaller) QR code which I then printed onto a credit-card-sized template, and laminated with sticky tape onto some plastic supermarket "loyalty" cards, so that I could carry arounde a QR code in a convenient format.
   • The border controllers accepted these self-printed and not-digitally-signed QR codes without question.
4. After we arrived we were required to perform a Day 2 PCR test
   • This means that you send someone between £40 and £150, they send you a test kit in the post, you apply the test to whomever amongst your circle of acquaintances is least likely to have Covid-19 (or has just performed a do-it-yourself free-of-charge NHS lateral flow test), and then post the sample back to them. A day later they send you an email with instructions which are so tedious and convoluted to follow that I never actually bothered to find out what the results were.
     • In detail, the email required you to log in to a website, provide a mobile phone number to which they would send an SMS with a code, which you then enter back into the website, which will then tell you the test result. In what way this is security without theatre, I have no idea.

At the time of this visit, the National Health Service in England was giving away free Lateral Flow Test kits for people to perform at home. You are encouraged (although in no way required) to submit the test results back to the NHS; this appears to be the primary way in which Britain is tracking the incidence of Covid-19 infections.

My girlfriend wanted to be able to do a self-test before returning to work in her office after we got back to Germany, so I went to the pharmacy in our local supermarket and asked "do you have the NHS Covid-19 test kits here?" The answer was "yes, how many would you like?"

I wasn't quite prepared for this response, so I hesitated for a few seconds, during which time the pharmacist helpfully continued "there are seven in each pack".

I was so astonished by the idea idea that they were giving them away in such profligate quantities that I didn't even ask how many packs they would be happy to give me, and took one.

We managed to get back to England again 5 weeks after leaving it, at the start of November 2021.

By this time the rules had changed:

• we did not need to get a certificate signed by some random and untraceable German doctor in advance of travelling
• we no longer needed to pay £40 - £150 for a PCR test on day 2 after arrival; we "merely" had to pay £15 each (see below) for a Lateral Flow Test to be done on or before day 2 after arrival.

The farce, however, had not subsided:

1. The Lateral Flow Tests were sent to us by post; we had to stick them up our noses (or the noses of any compliant person or animal in our vicinity), do the standard "15-minute wait for a line to appear" and then take a photograph of the result and send it back to them.
   • Have the people who thought up this system never heard of Photoshop^TM?
   • If one person in the group is in the least bit dubious about the result of their test, just wait until someone else's test is negative, and then use the remaining drops of their sample to "do your test"
2. Once again the self-printed "proof of vaccination status cards" were accepted without question (and, incidentally, without scanning them to see whether they actually said that the person was vaccinated)

By now, the rules for the free-of-charge Lateral Flow Tests from the NHS had changed. You have to register online (or call by telephone) to get a code, which you then need to present to the pharmacy , to get the test kits.

Registering online involves providing:

• a name
• an email address
  • (they helpfully suggest that if you don't have one of your own, you can provide one for someone you know)
• a postcode
  • (they helpfully suggest that if you do not have a fixed address, you can provide the postcode of somewhere nearby, such as your doctor's practice)

They then give you a 16-character code which you need to take to the pharmacy in order to be allowed to get the test kit.

What does the pharmacy do to verify the code?

They write it down by hand in a book, ask you how many test kit packs you want (still with seven tests in each pack) and then give them to you.

I'm willing to bet that all of the following would work:

1. fill in the online form, get the code, take it to three different pharmacies, get three times the number of test kits
2. fill in the online form, get the code, take it to the same pharmacy three days in a row, get three times the number of test kits
3. fill in the online form with absolutely bogus credentials (including an email address which, for example, points back to the NHS), get as many test kits as you like (see above) so they have absolutely no idea who did it
   • for bonus points, use the supermarket in-house wireless Internet access to fill in the form so they can't even tell whose Internet connection was used for the bogus order
4. skip the technology, don't bother to fill in the online form, make up a code which approximately matches the pattern of letters and digits, and take to whichever pharmacies you fancy

If you do this within 2 days of arriving in the UK, you can of course use these tests to ensure that you're going to get a negative result when you perform an official Day 2 test.

[This is the "see below" part]

The test kits they hand out are identical to the ones the UK government makes you pay a minimum of £15 for, in order to enter the country. They are from the same manufacturer, they come in the same packaging, they have the same instructions, and they work in the same way.

Now, I'm not saying "the NHS gives them away for free, so therefore they cost nothing", but I certainly am saying that they do not cost £15 each, which is what several companies are now reaping the rewards of by selling them on government-approved websites, to people who cannot enter the country without paying for them in advance.

Just in case you want to save the NHS a bit of money, and instead of fetching a pack of seven LFTs so that you can be sure to take a sample from someone who tests negative for Covid-19 in order to send the photo off to the UK government, there are various other things you can put into the sample container in order to get a negative result.

Here are the ones I've tried so far:

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