We show you our most important and recent visitors news details UK lifts all testing requirements for vaccinated travelers in the following article
Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - LONDON — Vaccinated travelers can enter Britain without taking any coronavirus tests starting Friday, after the government scrapped one of the final restrictions imposed over the past two years in response to COVID-19.
British residents and visitors who have had at least two doses of an approved coronavirus vaccine now only need to fill out a passenger locator form before traveling to the U.K. Unvaccinated people still have to take tests both before and after arriving but no longer need to self-isolate until they get a negative result.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the U.K. “now has one of the most free-flowing borders in the world — sending a clear message that we are open for business.”
Airlines and other travel firms hailed the change as a lifeline after two years of severely constricted travel. Andrew Flintham, managing director of travel group Tui UK, said there was “a huge pent-up demand for international travel,” and people were rushing to book getaways for the February school break and April’s Easter holiday.
British Airways chief executive Sean Doyle urged other countries to follow Britain’s “pragmatic approach.”
But some scientists worry the government is moving too fast. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government lifted most domestic rules last month. Face masks are no longer mandatory in most indoor spaces in England, vaccine passports for gaining entry to nightclubs and large-scale events were scrapped, as was the official advice to work from home. Other parts of the U.K. — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — have also lifted most restrictions.
Johnson announced this week that he hopes to lift the final restriction — mandatory self-isolation for people who test positive — by the end of February as part of a plan to live long-term with COVID-19. Officials have said the government plans to switch from legal restrictions to advisory measures and treat the coronavirus more like the flu as it becomes endemic in the country.
The re-opening came as statistics showed the U.K. economy grew by a bigger-than-expected 7.5% in 2021, despite an omicron-driven slowdown at the end of the year. The re-imposition of some restrictions in response to the highly transmissible variant brought a 0.2% contraction in December.
The Office for National Statistics said the growth follows a 9.4% contraction in 2020 as the pandemic shut down big chunks of the economy. The U.K. economy is now back to the size it was in February 2020, just before the new coronavirus swept the U.K.
Britain has Europe’s highest coronavirus toll after Russia, with more than 159,000 officially recorded deaths. The country has seen a drop in both new infections and COVID-19 patients admitted to hospitals since the peak of the omicron spike in early January.
Officials have credited the government’s booster jab program with preventing the surge in omicron cases from causing serious stress to U.K. hospitals. In Britain, 84.6% of people 12 and up have had two doses of a vaccine and almost two-thirds have had a third, booster shot. — Agencies
These were the details of the news UK lifts all testing requirements for vaccinated travelers for this day. We hope that we have succeeded by giving you the full details and information. To follow all our news, you can subscribe to the alerts system or to one of our different systems to provide you with all that is new.
It is also worth noting that the original news has been published and is available at Saudi Gazette and the editorial team at AlKhaleej Today has confirmed it and it has been modified, and it may have been completely transferred or quoted from it and you can read and follow this news from its main source.
