British tourists raced back from Mexico to beat strict quarantine requirements which came into force this morning.
Earlier this week, the government announced the North American country would be added to the red travel list.
Mexico had previously been on the less restrictive amber list but was moved with a few days notice, along with Georgia and two French islands.
Travellers were given until 4am on August 8 to land in the UK or face having to pay £1,750 per person to isolate in a managed hotel room for 10 days.
Cases have risen sharply in recent weeks in Mexico following a steep decline that began to go the wrong way in May.
As of August 6, cases are back up to more than 20,000 a day – but it’s not just infection rates which are concerning UK health officials.
Variants of the virus seldom seen in the UK are known to have originated in South America and spread to neighbouring countries.
On July 21, Public Health England labelled a new version of the virus (B.1.621) as a ‘variant under investigation’ after data showed it may have been behind a surge of cases in Colombia, where it is most prevalent and which is already on the red list.
There have been 37 cases of the variant detected in England so far and the strain is growing in several countries around the world, although generally in low numbers.
According to PHE, there is ‘preliminary laboratory evidence to suggest that vaccination and previous infection may be less effective at preventing infection’ in cases involving the B.1.621 variant.
The most recent data shows Mexico has the fourth highest rates of the new variant, behind Spain and the USA (although it’s unclear if this is skewed by the relative amount of sequencing being done in those countries).
When the changes were announced, the countries moving to the red list were described as ‘presenting a high public risk to the UK from known variants of concern, known high-risk variants under investigation or as a result of very high in-country or territory prevalence of Covid-19’.
But there is better news for UK tourists today, with Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Latvia, Romania and Norway all added to the government’s green list for travel.
India, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will move from the red list to amber.
Extra restrictions imposed on people arriving from France last month have also been scrapped today.
Unlike other amber list countries, double-vaccinated travellers still needed to isolate after crossing the Channel over fears about rates of the Beta variant in the country.
Health experts are satisfied that the variant is being squeezed out of the picture by Delta, which is already dominant in the UK, and have removed the requirement while tightening restrictions on the French overseas territories of La Reunion and Mayotte.
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