WHILE holiday hotspots such as Thailand and Mexico remain on the red list, a recent study has found that they are SAFER than the UK when it comes to catching Covid.
The red list still applies to more than 50 countries, despite the traffic light system being removed last week.
Turkey, Egypt, and the Maldives were removed from it, but Thailand and Mexico are some of the popular countries for Brits which are still on the list.
Recent figures from NHS Test and Trace show that positive Covid cases were only 0.77 percent from individuals in red-list quarantine hotels, as opposed to 1.14 percent for the UK.
Because of the low number of positive results in hotel quarantines, Brits who have returned from red list countries are reporting far fewer positive results than those who were there.
This could further prove the need to scrap the red list, which requires families to pay £2,285 each to quarantine for 10 days at a hotel, with travel experts warning that it is no longer needed.
While the original purpose of the red-list quarantine rules was to prevent the spread in the UK of new Covid varieties, current results only reveal the Delta variant. This variant is already common in the UK.
Suzanne Lugthart, who analyzed the data, said: “The forced imprisonment of the healthy in quarantine hotels is one of the least scientific and most heinous political interventions seen during the pandemic in the name of public health.”
She said that the data shows the scheme achieves “precisely nothing,” adding: “The people incarcerated in English quarantine hotels at huge cost to their bank balances and mental health are less likely to test positive for Covid than the population at large for the fourth week in a row.”
Ireland’s Health Minister Stephen Donnelly announced on Saturday that all of the countries on the list which required the quarantine were removed, ending the hotel scheme, due to the diminishing threat of the Delta variant.
It is hoped that the UK could follow suit, with the Department for Transport (DfT) understood to back the move, according to the Telegraph.
A travel industry expert told the Telegraph that the UK is an “outlier” for arrivals testing, and warned that it was “a policy of its time but things have moved on”.
New rules will reduce restrictions on testing for Brits who are vaccinated and return to the UK.
From October 4, a pre-arrival test is no longer required. The day two PCR will be replaced by a lateral flow later next month.