Germany will be removed from the UK’s travel corridor list, having remained one of the last European countries exempt from travel restrictions.
Source: "Lufthansa" by BriYYZ is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
On November 5, The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) removed Germany, along with Sweden, from the UK’s travel corridor list. Travellers arriving in the UK from 4am on November 7 will now have to self-isolate for two weeks. Germany now joins many other European countries, including France and Spain, which were removed from the travel corridor during the summer.
This follows Germany declaring the UK a risk zone on October 24. Travellers arriving in Germany from the UK currently have to self-isolate for two weeks, or present a negative COVID-19 test.
Germany has seen a sharp increase in new coronavirus cases in recent weeks. “There has been a consistent increase in Covid-19 cases per 100,000 of the population in Germany over the past four weeks, with a 75 per cent increase in total cases over this time period”, said the UK Department for Transport (DfT).
“A range of factors are taken into account when deciding to remove a country from the exemption list, including the continued increase of coronavirus within a country, the numbers of new cases, information on a country’s testing capacity, testing regime and test positivity rate, and potential trajectory of the disease in the coming weeks.”
The DfT advises those currently in Germany to “finish their trip as usual, following the local rules and checking the FCDO [Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office] travel advice pages on gov.uk for further information”.
According to WHO’s Corona Tracker, there are currently 23,287 new COVID-19 cases in the UK, and 13,820 in Germany. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has recorded the 14-day cumulative number of COVID-19 cases per 100 000 inhabitants of the UK and Germany respectively to be 469.2 and 259.9.