UK travel agents must think that Grant Shapps really hates them

We got the latest three-weekly update to UK travel restrictions last night. For some reason the government thought that releasing the update at 10 p.m. was the optimal timing to publish the changes. That is 4 p.m. in Mexico, which was moved to the red list in what was probably the biggest surprise in the announcement. I’m sure UK travel agents and airlines will have been really grateful for the opportunity to work through the night dealing with frantic calls from their customers scrambling to get home before the deadline of 4 a.m. on Sunday.

There were a number of other changes announced, notably the move of France back to the amber list from the specially created “amber plus” list. Whilst most independent commentators (including me) thought that amber plus was misconceived from the start, it was good to see the government’s willingness to quickly reverse a decision that should never have been taken in the first place.

Before I go into the other changes, let us look at the reasons why Mexico was moved to the red list.

Mexico goes red

We actually got a statement explaining the move of Mexico to the red list from the government:

“Mexico has been added to the red list due to increasing incidence in country, growing positive cases of those travelling to the UK, and the presence of the B.1.621 variant first identified in Colombia.”

Mexico has long time had a test positivity rate which was above the level that I thought should qualify it for red status. At the time of the previous review for example, over 30% of tests conducted in the country were positive. I thought a figure above 12.5% would normally get a country “red listed”. I assumed that the thing that was stopping that was that the percentage of people testing positive on arrival from Mexico were relatively reassuring. Only 1.2% at the last review. That had gone up to 3.3% in the latest data, but that didn’t seem enough of a change to me to trigger a change of status. Obviously, the government’s advisors took another view.

Mexico is certainly having a big rise in cases, driven by the Delta variant. But it does seem a bit odd to focus on the B.1.621 variant’s presence in Mexico just as it appears to be dying out in the face of the fast spreading Delta. You can see this in the following chart on Mexico variant mix from outbreak.info. The big dark blue area is Delta, B.1.621 is the dark green area which has been present, but in gradual decline for months. Neither B.1.621 nor Gamma (P.1) look like they can compete with Delta to me.

France back to amber, Reunion and La Mayotte to red

This is what should have been done at the last review, assuming that the Beta variant is something to worry about. As I explained in an earlier post, I’m not at all convinced about that. But the decision to put France onto an “amber plus list” because of an outbreak of Beta in the French overseas territories of Reunion and La Mayotte was always a bit mad. Especially as they left those places on the amber list.

Anyway, it is sorted out now, for which we should be thankful.

One more red addition

As well as Mexico and the French overseas territories, we also got Georgia added to the red list. The case rate has been above what I thought were red list levels for a while, but with low numbers of arrivals into the UK testing positive, it had stayed amber. Those figures are still not bad, at 2.2%, so I thought it would stay amber. But the case rate is now so high (almost 500 weekly cases per 100,000) that I guess that became the deciding factor. Understandable.

Finally, some countries escape the red list

In my latest round up of what I thought the government should do in this update, I said that Bahrain, India and the UAE should go from red to amber and I’m pleased to say those changes were indeed made.

As predicted, Turkey is being forced to wait, probably because case rates have been climbing there recently.

Update: I forgot to mention Qatar, which also escaped the red list. I didn’t expect that, because according to the data I have, they have Beta variant cases. But digging a little deeper, the latest public variant data is from early June. Perhaps Qatar have privately supplied the UK with more recent data confirming that they don’t have Beta cases now.

New countries on the green list

I thought the data from Slovakia and Romania could get these countries onto the green list, and it did.

There were three small countries that had low case enough case rates to qualify too (Bhutan, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon), but maybe the lack of sequencing data kept them off the green list.

I was quite confident of Poland and Hungary going green and I’m still a bit mystified as to what has prevented that. Both have really low case rates, much lower than countries that did make the list. Poland has a small amount (1.1%) of Gamma variant, so maybe that is holding things back. Hungary hasn’t uploaded many sequences to GISAID, so that could be the reason there.

Perhaps more interesting is that there were five countries that got added to the green list that I did not expect. In each case, they were “near misses” according to the thresholds I was using. Near misses for case rates, where I assumed a threshold of 20 weekly cases per 100,000, were Austria (29), Slovenia (23). Latvia (27) and Norway (29). So it looks like 30 might be the threshold that is being used now. I had ruled out Germany on the basis of its test positivity of 2.3%, above the 1.5% threshold I was assuming. Perhaps 2.5% is good enough for green these days.

Verdict

The changes that got announced this time round were more understandable than usual. It looks to me like the government has slightly relaxed its thresholds for what it takes to make the green list.

I still think that an overcautious approach is being taken to variants such as Beta, Gamma and now B.1.621. They all seem to me to be dying out whenever faced with competition from the Delta variant that we already have. But perhaps with a few more weeks of data, the position will change on that too.

No revisions got announced to the testing requirements. That’s the next big thing that needs to change, in my view. About 1.5% of people arriving from green and amber list countries tested positive after arrival in the first three weeks of July. That’s exactly the same rate as the ONS estimates for the overall UK population.

International travellers are being treated as if they are high risk, when the facts demonstrate that they are not. The government would respond to that statement by talking about the risk from variants. But that is what the red list is for, isn’t it?

What did we learn from the latest update of UK travel restrictions?