Why is the UAE on the red list with so few virus cases?
Q Any idea why the United Arab Emirates is on the red list with India and Brazil? It’s crazy. People are going back to work in offices in Dubai.
Matt W
A Yes, as of Tuesday night I know exactly why the UAE is on the red list. The nation was added to the highrisk category on 29 January – a status requiring hotel quarantine for anyone arriving from Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the rest of the nation to the UK.
Like you, I had found it perplexing that a country with such a remarkable vaccination record should be subject to the toughest rules for travellers to the UK. Yet everyone over 16 is entitled to vaccination more or
less on demand. Today the number of jabs is likely to overtake the population of the UAE, as second doses are administered.
Some people had suggested that the reason for the UK red-list ban was because ministers had been alarmed by the number of UK social media influencers who were posting from Dubai over Christmas and New Year. Although it was legal to travel abroad, the home secretary, in particular, was highly critical.
But we now know that the government has an extra, previously undisclosed criterion for adding a country to the red list: if it is home to a global aviation hub.
On Tuesday, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, told an online ConservativeHome event that the Gulf state’s status as “major transit hub” meant UK health authorities could not be certain about travellers’ origins. He told the audience: “We are not restricting UAE because of levels of coronavirus.” The specific issue in the UAE, he said, “is one of transit”.
Mr Shapps says that the Joint Biosecurity Centre makes the decisions on red list countries.
“The Joint Biosecurity Centre can work wonders studying all this detail,” he said. “But eventually you get to the point where they are having to make too many assumptions about where people are travelling to/from. And that is a specific issue we have with the UAE as opposed to prevalence.”
The very same issue, you might imagine, must affect Istanbul airport – currently the busiest in Europe – as well as Frankfurt, Paris CDG and Amsterdam airports. But so far Turkey, Germany, France and the Netherlands have escaped the red list.
We will find out early next month who might make the quarantine-free “green list” – and you can be sure it won’t include the UAE.