London : Britain will remove all 11 countries from its COVID-19 travel red list from Wednesday as there is now community transmission of Omicron, Health Secretary Sajid Javid told parliament.
The British government added southern African countries to its red list at the end of November, meaning entry was only allowed to UK citizens or residents who were quarantined in a hotel to slow the spread of the Omicron variant. Will happen.
“Now that community transmission of Omicron is occurring in the UK and Omicron has spread so widely around the world, the Travel Red List is less effective in slowing the infiltration of Omicron from abroad,” Javid said.
“While we will maintain our temporary testing measures for international travel, we will remove all 11 countries from the travel red list from 4 a.m. tomorrow.”
The UK requires all inbound passengers to take a PCR or rapid lateral flow test up to a maximum of 48 hours before departure.
Transportation Secretary Grant Shapps said these testing measures would be reviewed in the first week of January.
“As always, we keep all of our travel measures under review and we may impose new restrictions if needed to do so to protect public health,” he said on Twitter.
The 11 countries that will be removed from the list are Angola, Botswana, Eswantini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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