"Government is being negligent over border control," doctor tells Nigel Farage

29 April 2020, 19:49 | Updated: 29 April 2020, 21:20

"Government is being negligent over border control," doctor tells Nigel Farage

This doctor told Nigel Farage he thinks the government are being "negligent" over refusing to close borders and wondered if they are "altering border advice to suit them."

Imran is a GP from Glasgow and agreed with Nigel that the UK should close their borders during the pandemic.

"The UK government has been massively slow in their response and not shutting down flights into the country, and especially not screening at the airports, is going to end up biting us on the bum," Imran said.

He told Nigel that six weeks ago before the lockdown he had a patient who had just arrived at Heathrow from Italy and called him to ask if he was safe to return to Glasgow.

Imran told him the patient said he'd got off the plane at Heathrow, nobody had asked him anything, like if he had a temperature, and did not even ask him which areas of Italy he had come from.

"I had to take that patient's goodwill to phone me because he felt that duty to ask if it's safe for me to come up.

"The government is being negligent with this - and I seriously doubt the motive behind SAGE's advice that we don't need to do this," the doctor said.

He said it was "quite possible" many at SAGE haven't changed their mind about the herd immunity concept.

"Part of me wonders if....the government are just altering the advice to suit them, could it just be that they don't have the manpower to test people at airports? Is it that they're worried about the economy too much?" Imran asked, wondering if the same could be said for the PPE shortages issue.

Nigel also commented on the way government are counting PPE, which was discovered in a Panorama documentary: "A pair of gloves under the government's PPE numbers counts as two not one."

Imran said that like the documentary, he had also received out of date PPE at his surgery with a new expiry date stuck over the top.

Once the pandemic has subsided, the UK's medical system will be entirely reset, Imran thought: "I have seen maybe six patients in the last week face to face, everything else has been via videos or via telephone."