What is driving the UK’s list of countries exempt from quarantine requirements?

The UK government lists 70 countries on its “Travel Corridors” page that are exempt from the requirement to quarantine for 14 days. That sounds like a lot of countries, but only 27 of them have a population over a million.

The UK uses a threshold of 20 cases in the last 7 days per 100,000 population (the “case rate”) as its guideline for exempting a country, although it has now started to look at smaller regions within a country where there are big differences and available data to take a more granular approach.

Given how critical being “on the list” is for travel volumes, I took a look at the trends in case rate to see what we can expect in the next few weeks.

There is a lot of data to get through, so I’m going to break it down into groups of countries, starting with Europe.

European case rates are rising

Of the 27 exempt countries with a population over a million, 17 are in Europe. In general, case rates are rising again in Europe, so the key question is whether any of the currently exempt countries are going to lose that status.

I’ve shown below the case rate for the largest of the currently exempt countries, those with a population over 8 million. I’ve included the equivalent figure for the United Kingdom for reference.

*Source: GridPoint analysis of data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control*

You can see why the government has announced that Hungary and Portugal will be removed from the list on Saturday. They have been above the threshold for some days now.

With a case rate of 17.0, Italy looks safe for now. However the rate has been creeping up and could easily be above 20 within a couple of weeks. Anyone heading off this weekend for a fortnight in Italy may well find they need to quarantine on their return.

Somewhat embarrassingly, the UK has been above its own threshold since the 8th September and now has a case rate of 26.6.

The next group of exempt European countries, those with populations between 4 and 8 million, are shown on the following chart, again with the UK for reference.

Both Denmark and Ireland are now above the threshold and might therefore be at risk of losing their exemptions. However, in both cases they are no worse than the UK. Ireland is part of the UK’s single travel area and I strongly doubt that the UK will introduce quarantine given the politics.

You can see that politics trumps statistics by looking at Gibraltar. It remains on the exempt list with no apparent plans to change that despite a case rate of 83.1. Quarantine was reintroduced for Spain on the 25th July when the case rate hit 25.9. Note the different scale on this chart.

The Caribbean is a bright spot as we approach peak season

With one exception, all the big Caribbean markets are on the exempt list, which is important as the Caribbean is a major winter tourist market from the UK. The case rates are well below the threshold and don’t seem to be increasing, so hopefully that won’t change as we enter the peak season, which starts in December. The exception is Jamaica, which has a case rate of 20.9, only just above the threshold. The rate has been dropping in recent weeks, so I am quite hopeful that the popular tourist destination will get added to the list shortly.

The rest of the Americas remains off-limits for now

None of the big countries in the Americas is currently exempt, which in general is no surprise with most case rates well above the government’s threshold.

One oddity is Canada, which has a low and stable case rate of only 11.8 and yet has still not been exempted from quarantine requirements. Maybe there are some politics involved here that I am not aware of.

The big one of course is the USA. With a case rate of 74.9, the prospects of getting quarantine requirements lifted seem a long way away. However there has been a good improvement in the last week and if that were sustained, the rate could drop below the threshold in five weeks time. The other way in which things could open up earlier would be the application of a more regional approach. The case rate in New York for example is now only 29.9, much closer to the magic 20.

Mexico may also benefit from a more targeted approach. The country average of 27.8 is quite a bit above the threshold and doesn’t seem to be improving very fast. But some of the major beach destinations are below the country average. Whether the UK is confident about the accuracy of the statistics remains to be seen.

Rest of the World

The chart below shows the stats for a few other important markets in Asia and Africa.

Of these markets, only Turkey and Japan are exempt. It is easy to see why India is not and South Africa has only just dipped below the threshold, so maybe that will change if the trend continues.

Also requiring quarantine are China, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria. I didn’t include them on the chart because the case rates for these countries essentially show a flat line at zero, according to official statistics. Apparently the UK doesn’t trust those statistics or has other reasons to exclude them.

But why is Singapore still on the quarantine list? I don’t think anyone would doubt their competence in managing the pandemic, or the quality of their statistics. It has been well below the threshold for weeks. Australia and New Zealand are exempt, but you need flights from places like Singapore if travel is to resume.

Will testing come to the rescue?

The industry has been pushing for the introduction of a testing regime which could replace quarantine. That seems unlikely as I explained in my last post.

What does seem to be likely is a reduction in the quarantine period, from 14 days to 5 days if an arriving passenger tests negative at the airport on arrival and again after 5 days. That would certainly help, but what the industry really needs is for the case rates to drop so that quarantine requirements can be eliminated completely.

Getting away this winter

For any Brits looking to escape the depressing news on the pandemic, Brexit and the great British weather this winter, I’d recommend doing your bit to keep the aviation industry alive with a nice Caribbean break.

Playing the UK’s quarantine lottery