Nigeria and other African nations were removed as the UK abandons Red List. One of the new developments that came alongside the rising spate of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus was the United Kingdom’s Red List of countries that it forbade travelers from.
The list which had been criticized across the world as discriminatory has finally been abolished after only being enacted less than a month ago. Although the United Kingdom government claimed that the list was necessary in order to keep in check the increased infections the nation was experiencing, the list was missing the countries with the highest incidences of the virus and consisted only of African nations.
The new development on the abolition of the list will be in effect from 4 am on Wednesday, allowing travelers from the countries previously listed to arrive in the country with a negative COVID test as before. The UK Health Minister informed the Parliament that the decision to abandon the list is a result of the community transmission of the Omicron variant now making the list less effective in slowing down the infection rate in the country.
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His statement said, “Now that there is community transmission of Omicron in the UK and Omicron has spread so widely across the world, the travel red list is now less effective in slowing the incursion of Omicron from abroad,”
“Whilst we will maintain our temporary testing measures for international travel we will be removing all 11 countries from the travel red list effective from 4 am tomorrow morning,” he said on Tuesday.
