Spain and France will stay on UK quarantine list indefinitely – health ministry warns ‘things are not going well’
SPAIN and France are likely to stay on the UK quarantine list for the next few weeks - after comments from the Spanish health emergencies warned "things are not going well".
The two countries, popular with British holiday makers, were removed from the safe travel list after soaring coronavirus cases in the country.
Spain was placed on the quarantine list on July 26, while France followed suit on August 15 along with Malta and The Netherlands.
France's coronavirus cases are currently at 229,814 while Spain has become the highest in Europe at 404,229.
The UK government placed them on the list after their new daily cases rose above 20 per 100,000 over a seven day period, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
Similarly, Portugal was removed from the UK quarantine list after their new daily cases remained under 20 - France (23.4) and Spain (87.5) are yet to fall.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps warned the two countries are unlikely to be added to the UK's travel corridor list any time soon.
He told LBC: "At the moment I'm afraid France and Spain have both been going the wrong way."
"So just to put numbers on this, we respond when there are about 20 cases per 100,000 of the population measured over a seven-day rolling average. So 20 is the figure to bear in mind."
He added: "I think that the last that I saw of Spain it was up in the 40s and 50s so a long way off that, and France, who [...] quarantined from last weekend, I'm afraid to say we were right to do that because we've seen the cases continue to carry on up in France as well.
"And in order to put a country back in to the travel corridor, what we say is it needs to stay below that number for a couple of cycles. So a cycle is two weeks long for coronavirus."
However, he added that the situation was not "out of control on a national level" and they were dealing with the new cases on a regional level.
Madrid has faced the highest increase for new cases, at 2,344, followed by 1,095 in Catalonia (where Barcelona is located) and 599 in Andalusia.
There is hope yet - the UK is looking at forming regional air bridges with destinations such as Spain to allow Brits to return to the Balearic and Canary Islands.
Mr Shapps said in future he wanted to be able to look at data for regions if possible.
He told the BBC earlier: "The islands, particularly the Spanish islands, when Spain went into lockdown, we saw in one the numbers coming up and in the other set the numbers coming down - so we do need to be absolutely sure that you're capturing the disease as it actually is and sometimes it's not quite as straightforward as it sounds."
He warned that while this could work for islands, it may not work for countries such as France: "I think it's harder to do within a country – people say, with France for example, why don't you just do this region and not the other?
"The answer is it's quite easy to travel about the country so we're not able to do it like that."
Some countries have remained off the UK quarantine list as their cases remain low.
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