The UK finally publishes its very short “green list”
After much delay and amidst considerable speculation, the UK government finally published its list of which countries would be on the “green list” when non-essential overseas travel is allowed to resume on May 17th. That is the set of countries for which travellers will not need to quarantine on their return to the UK.
I stuck my neck out four weeks ago and came up with my own predictions, based on the not particularly well defined list of criteria that had been outlined by the government..
How did I do?
Overall comments
I was correct that the list of green countries would be very short and would be mostly populated by countries that nobody would think of going to on holiday (like the Falklands), or where you would not be allowed in (like New Zealand).
I came up with a list of eight “green” destinations and in reality we got twelve. Good news? Well, not really.
Places you probably don’t want to go to on holiday
I only looked at countries where there was any meaningful amount of UK outbound leisure traffic in 2019. I wasn't interested in trying to predict whether the Falklands would be green or amber. Half of the countries included in the government’s list were like that. There were six of them:
Brunei
Falkland Islands
Faroe Islands
Singapore
South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands
St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.
Even though it didn't feature in my list of UK outbound leisure destinations, perhaps Singapore could be considered a desirable leisure destination. But I don’t think they are letting anyone in at the moment anyway, certainly not without quarantine.
Destinations that I got right
Of the remaining six green destinations, I correctly predicted all but one:
Australia
Gibraltar
Iceland
Israel
New Zealand
The one that I missed was Portugal. I thought it would not be green due to concerns about the Brazilian variant. All the other metrics such as case rates looked good. Four weeks ago, GISAID were reporting that 16% of the cases in Portugal were the the P.1 variant, one of the “variants of concern” that the UK is trying to keep out. The latest data from GISAID show that this has fallen to 3.8% over the last four weeks, so perhaps that made the difference.
Countries I thought would make it onto the green list, but didn’t
There were three countries that I predicted could be green, but “no-showed” on the day:
Ireland
Malta
United States
I believe that the only reason Ireland was not included on the green list is because it is already exempt from the quarantine rules due to the “common travel area”. Arrivals from Ireland into the UK are treated as if they are domestic. This doesn’t work in the opposite direction, at least for air travellers. Arrivals from the UK into Ireland are treated as international and are currently still subject to quarantine requirements.
Why were Malta and the US not included? Case numbers there are low and falling. Malta in particular is almost on a par with the UK and Portugal.
Perhaps the case rate in the United States is still considered to be too high? I thought that the advanced state of the vaccination programme in the US would count for something, but as we’ll see in a minute, that doesn’t seem to have been a consideration.
It is clear from the government statements that they are worried about Border Force (the government agency responsible for checking documents at immigration) not being able to cope with the kinds of increased volume of travel that would undoubtedly come from opening up a market the size of the United States. If that is the real reason that the US didn’t make the green list, the long-haul carriers will be understandably furious.
The government boasted that they are being fully transparent about both the methodology and the data that have been used to make their judgements. So of course I went looking for the documentation, hoping to find out why they had excluded these two countries.
“A fully transparent process, driven by the data”
It took me a while to find the promised documents. The announcement included 18 links to other useful information. But although they reference the “Joint Biosecurity Centre’s assessment of the latest data”, they didn't provide a link. It is almost as if they don’t actually want anyone to look at it.
To save you the time, here are the links that were missing from their announcement. There are two, the methodology and the data.
I was hoping that this documentation would explain why Malta and the United States had been excluded. But the first disappointment is that is that the data is only provided for countries which have been rated as red or green. So there is no data supplied for any of the amber countries.
That means the data is completely useless for answering the only real question anyone has, which is “why is this country not on the green list?”
What new data been made available?
When you look at the data that is given, there are five data fields which just reference existing publicly available data for cases, tests, vaccinations and the number of variant reports to GISAID. That’s exactly the same data as I used in my assessment.
There are six data fields which contain new data - all of which relate to figures for the results of UK testing of arriving travellers from each country. They are:
How many arriving passengers were tested?
How many tested positive?
What percentage tested positive? (2 divided by 1)
How many of the positive tests were sequenced?
How may of the sequenced tests were variants of concern?
What was the variant of concern detection rate? (5 divided by 4)
Since two of these are just calculations based on the other fields, that’s only four pieces of data really. What is worse is that any number which is less than three, or is derived from such a figure, is redacted due to privacy concerns. As a result, the published data consists mainly of asterisks, indicating that the data has been suppressed. Pretty much the only data that is actually supplied is the number of people who were tested.
Other than that, all we know from this data is that 0.6% of people arriving from Portugal tested positive, 2.7% of those coming from Turkey and 1.2% of arrivals from Nepal. The only data point disclosed on the number of tests which were sequenced is the figure for Turkey, where 56% of the positive tests got sequenced. That is supposed to be 100%, according to government statements that they are sequencing all positive tests.
The data on the number of variants of concern detected have been suppressed completely since it is less than three for every country.
All in all, pretty useless.
What about the methodology?
We had previously been told that the government would consider the following four factors:
the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated
the rate of infection
the prevalence of variants of concern
the country’s access to reliable scientific data and genomic sequencing
Ministers continue to talk about the need to protect the UK from countries that have not made the same level of progress on vaccinations. But the process described in the methodology document barely mentions vaccinations.
The risk assessments provided by the experts to ministers are described like this:
“Available and relevant sources of information are used to provide an overall assessment on genomic surveillance capability, COVID-19 transmission risk and VoC transmission risk for each country/territory.
Travel connections with the UK and details of the in-country/territory vaccination profile are included as contextual information.”
There seems to be no evidence that progress on vaccinations has had any influence on the classifications.
To be honest, that makes sense to me. As I said in my previous post “It is actually quite hard to get your head round why the UK might consider vaccination status at all”.
The experts seem to agree with me. Quite why the government continues to play it up as an important factor is a little odd. Probably because vaccinations is the only area where the UK is acknowledged to have done a good job and politicians therefore like to talk about it at every opportunity.
Crumbs of comfort
I thought that when the government lifted the blanket ban, they might add several higher risk countries to the red list. I was correct on Turkey, which was added to the red list as part of the announcement. But generally, the government stepped back from adding high case rate countries in Europe to the red list, even though in many cases they also have a considerable prevalence of variants of concern.
It is also worth remembering that even though most countries failed to make the green list, moving from a position where non-essential overseas travel is legally banned to one where it is once again permitted does represent an improvement, even if quarantine and testing requirements will remain a big barrier to travel.
The list will be revisited again every three weeks. If the infection rate in the US continues to improve at the same pace as it has recently, by then infections will be very similar to the UK, making it even harder to explain why it remains on the amber list.
Let’s hope that Border Force can get its act together by then.
