Remove Egypt from travel red list immediately

Egypt should be immediately removed from the red list for travel. The Government has failed to explain why Egypt was added to the red list to begin with, when, compared to some countries on the amber list, Egypt had and continues to have more favorable COVID indicators.

It is unacceptable that the Government imposed such extreme travel restrictions on apparently arbitrary, inconsistent and/or unsubstantiated grounds.

According to World Health Organisation data, Egypt had recorded 7,282 new cases in the seven days prior to its red-listing. This is a drop of around 9 per cent from the previous week. The incident numbers have continued to decrease since, whilst vaccination uptake increased. There is also no evidence of a Delta-variant surge.

Egypt was added to the red list of high-risk countries on 08 June 2021 with enhanced travel restrictions, because COVID-19 prevalence in Egypt was assessed to be high and there was evidence to suggest community transmission of variants of concern. The government took this decisive action to impose additional measures on Egypt to limit the importation of variants of concern to England and to protect the roll out of the COVID-19 vaccination programme at a critical time.

These measures permit entry to only British and Irish Nationals (and third country nationals with residence rights in the UK) arriving from high-risk (known as red list) countries and are also required to quarantine in government managed hotels. These are all temporary measures that are kept under regular review and the government maintains that they will only be kept in place whilst the level of risk justifies the measures.

On 17 May 2021, the Government introduced the traffic light system to provide a framework for a safe and sustainable return to international travel. The traffic light system categorises countries and territories based on risk to protect public health and the vaccine rollout from variants of COVID-19. The traffic light system categorises countries based on risk to protect public health and the vaccine rollout from variants of COVID-19. The Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) produces risk assessments of countries and territories. Decisions on red, amber or green list assignment and associated border measures are taken by Ministers, who take into account the JBC risk assessments, alongside wider public health factors. Key factors in the JBC risk assessment of each country include: