UK travel quarantine exclusions questioned

The Chinese mainland has failed to make a list of more than 70 countries and regions deemed by Britain as safe travel destinations, despite the persistently low numbers of new daily coronavirus infections there.

Travel to the 70-plus destinations on the UK government list means that Britons returning home will not have to go into 14 days' quarantine－and the Chinese omission puzzles some observers.

On the Chinese mainland, the seven-day moving average of daily new COVID-19 cases stood at 12 on July 3, when the UK government's travel list was announced.

In contrast, Turkey, with 1,172 cases at the same time, and Spain, with 508, are on the quarantine-free list.

Karol Sikora, dean of medicine at Buckingham University, said:"There is no scientific justification for this. Our travel corridor policy is full of inconsistencies. China is well clear of the virus now."

The government has refused to publish the full criteria on which its decisions were based, but the Department for Transport said the list was determined by factors including virus incidence rates, trends in incidences, and deaths, transmission status, international epidemic intelligence, a country's testing capacity, and whether a nation's data can be trusted.

James Kennell, principal lecturer in tourism at the University of Greenwich, said it is hard to understand why the Chinese mainland was not included as a safe destination.

"Clearly, the British government is prioritizing the countries to whom it has the largest tourism flows, under strong pressure from both the UK travel industry and those destinations, who rely on British tourists," he said.

"This might help to explain why China was not included, but it ignores the huge and growing contribution of Chinese inbound tourism for the UK economy, and the significant flows of people moving for business and family reasons between the two nations."

Aside from the Chinese mainland, the United States is also absent from the UK's "air bridge" list for quarantine-free travel, with it grappling with a record number of new infections.

Wish to please US

Some critics suggest that the UK's decision to leave the Chinese mainland off its list was in part due to a wish to please the US, especially at a time when tensions between the nations is escalating.

Thanks to comprehensive measures taken by the Chinese government, including a much more substantial testing and pre-travel screening regime than seen in many other countries, the world's second-largest economy has been able return to normality.

Kennell said: "On that basis, the UK government should have more confidence that tourists arriving from China would be virus-free."

Ollie Shiell, founder of consultancy Asiability, which helps to bridge relationships between businesses in China and the UK, said: "The UK government's decision on which countries should be included on the UK travel corridor list appears to be driven by the objective of restarting tourism with countries where reciprocal travel is viable.

"If decisions were made purely on the basis of which nations are best managing COVID-19 outbreaks and risks today, then China should certainly be near the top of the UK's list."

He said he has no trouble trusting China's COVID-19 data.

"China wants its trading partners to bounce back quickly from the global pandemic and understands for that to happen, it must play its part in developing multilateral solutions to the threat of COVID-19," he said.