The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
JUST SAYING
Being double-jabbed is not a free pass into a pre-Covid world of travel, but it has injected me with some hope, says Chris Leadbeater
We made it! Brush up on a country’s entry requirements before you go – and you can relax “Just a moment sir. You shouldn’t feel a thing.” He didn’t say that, of course. The young man who injected my second Covid jab into my upper left arm last Saturday morning was too busy for niceties, and the pharmacy in question was in a dowdy corner of East London rather than an Ealing comedy.
He would have been wrong, too. I did feel a thing. A discomfort so small that, had I still been six years old, I might have been embarrassed to accept any consolatory lollipop. And a sensation of something significant entering my system. Not an impermeable shield of protection against illness, nor (glances at the more tinfoiled sections of social media) a legion of Bill Gates’s Deep-Bloodstream MindControl-A-Bots, but a realisation that, after 16 months of limitations, I may soon be able to enjoy some sort of normal life again.
The key words here being “soon” and “some sort”. Being doubly vaccinated is not an automatic pass into the pre-virus world, and it comes with caveats.
Earlier this week, I attended one of the Euro 2020 (2021) football semifinals (not that one; the one with the handsome Italians and Spaniards), but because it has not yet been 14 days since I had The Needle Part Two, I had to take a lateralflow test to be allowed into Wembley. Tonight, I am due to be out for dinner with friends and the evening will inevitably involve all of the track-and-tracing, QR-codescanning and masked loo breaks that have become standard.
But it is a start. And when it comes to travel, it is a restart. If a sharp scratch to my skin on Saturday was one small step, then Thursday’s big government announcement – that the twice-jabbed can go away to amber-listed countries from July 19 without needing to quarantine on return – was one giant leap. Suddenly, the world
Dinner with friends will still involved masked loo breaks, but it’s a start
doesn’t seem so shuttered.
Not that all of the shutters are up. In writing for this paper in the past few days, I have researched the latest entry requirements for France, Croatia and Greece. Each has its hoops that must be jumped through. But this has been a week of progress. It’s a thing. And you can feel it.