Indian students in panic over UK hotel quarantine cost

Thousands of Indian students hoping to return to universities in the United Kingdom for in-person study are in a ‘complete panic’ after the country was added to the travel red list, writes Hugo Daniel for iNews.

Since India was added on Friday 23 April, only British and Irish citizens and people with residency rights are allowed in and all must quarantine in a hotel for 10 days. Dozens of daily flights from India to the UK, mostly indirect but some direct, are still available to book online, but many students can’t afford the £1,750 (US$2,418) cost of isolating. i understands that the Department of Health and Social Care will ramp up hotel capacity to accommodate the influx of people expected to be returning to the UK from India. If more countries are added to the red list and hotel rooms did run out of space, quarantine facilities would be set up at airports.

Sanam Arora, from the National Indian Students and Alumni Union UK, told i: “We do expect the numbers of students [coming to the UK] to be in the thousands. There’s quite a few who are already here but there’s a significant chunk who are stuck there who were doing their first and second term remotely, and the requirement for them was to be in the country physically for the final semester … Students are in complete panic about this £1,750 charge they will have to pay for mandatory quarantine. If they are not from well-off families, they often take very high interest loans in order to come and study in the UK already.”
Full report on the iNews site