Portugal may be included in the list of countries exempted from quarantine on arrival in the United Kingdom in the coming days, within the scope of the reevaluation that the British Government indicated that it would do at the end of this month, advances the British press.
The Times newspaper reports today that London will give in to the "powerful pressure" of the Portuguese government, which considered the exclusion, at the beginning of July, of Portugal from the group of safe destinations as "absurd" and "wrong" and suggested an impact on bilateral relations.
It was the same British newspaper that at the time first put forward Portugal's potential absence from the list of “travellers” due to the outbreaks of Covid-19 cases in the Lisbon region at the end of June.
According to The Times, the list of 75 countries and territories will not be profoundly altered, but "it is expected that unquarantined travel to Portugal will be allowed."
The Daily Telegraph also admits the lifting of restrictions to Portugal, possibly through regional “corridors”, adding that Madeira, Azores and Algarve, the most popular destinations of the approximately two million British tourists annually, have a very small number of cases comparing with Lisbon, where more than half of the cases are active in the country.
"Regional airlifts are an option for countries with localized outbreaks," a transport ministry source told the newspaper on Wednesday, alluding to difficulties with the US, which could remain subject to quarantine for many months if quarantine applies a Nacional level.
Transport Minister Grant Shapps had indicated that a reassessment would be carried out by 27 July, invoking the use of "scientific and health criteria" determined by the Common Biosafety Center and the UK health directorate, with official data and models mathematicians from the University of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The categorization of countries, he specified, “was supported by an estimate of the proportion of the population currently infectious in each country, virus incidence rates, incidence and death trends, transmission status and international information on epidemics, in addition to information on capacity country test and an assessment of the quality of available data'.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augusto Santos Silva, argued at the time that the United Kingdom had “seven times more registered cases than Portugal and 28 times more deaths due to Covid-19”, adding: “The absurdity of this decision seems to evident to me».
The ambassador of Portugal to the United Kingdom, Manuel Lobo Antunes, also questioned days later, in an article for the Daily Telegraph, the "scientific arguments that support the decision of the British government", which, he said, "needs detail".
"Leaving Portugal off the list of trips exempt from quarantine is difficult to understand", he lamented, underlining the "huge" economic impact of the decision, which could be "prolonged if [the decision] is not changed in the next reassessment".
Last week, Secretary of State for Tourism, Rita Marques, expressed little confidence in Portugal's admission to the list of travel corridors with the United Kingdom due to the criterion used, the infection rate, to remain high.
Marques defended that the criterion “could be improved”, sticking to the criterion used by the European Union to open borders and that, in addition to infection rates, counted the number of deaths and occupation in intensive care, among other criteria.
However, Health Minister Marta Temido, earlier this week, highlighted the "encouraging sign" of a decrease in the incidence rate of Covid-19 in Portugal to 19 cases per 100.000 inhabitants in the last seven days, one of the most common indicators used in the comparison between countries.
The incidence rate in the previous two weeks was 43,2 per 100.000 inhabitants, a factor that weighed down restrictions on travelers from Portugal to other countries, such as Austria, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Finland or Belgium.
The UK will have determined as a condition to lift the quarantine a rate of 20 cases per 100.000 inhabitants.
Until Wednesday, according to official data, the United Kingdom had registered 45.501 deaths in more than 296 cases, while Portugal had registered 1.702 deaths associated with Covid-19 in 49.150 confirmed cases of infection.
The process of introducing a 14-day quarantine to all persons arriving in the UK from abroad on June 8 was marred by confusion and criticism from the tourism and air transport industry, academics and politicians, including the Conservative party itself.
Imposed to reduce the risk of a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the measure was questioned because of the economic impact by hundreds of British companies in a letter to Interior Minister Priti Patel.
Ryanair's president, Michael O'Leary, called the restrictions "idiotic" and "ridiculously ineffective" and, along with competitors British Airways and easyJet, launched a lawsuit to halt the measure.
At the end of June, when the first re-evaluation was due, the government indicated that it would open a series of "travel corridors" with countries considered to be low risk, but the list coded according to the traffic lights never materialized and was only announced several days later.
On the day of the announcement, on 3 July, 59 countries and 14 other territories were nominated, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) stopped advising against non-essential travel, an important issue because travel in these cases invalidates the respective insurance coverage. which prevents tour operators from including those destinations in their packages.
The fact that the British MNE continued to advise against travel to mainland Portugal, but failed to advise against the autonomous regions of the Azores and Madeira created confusion, leading the respective leaders to believe that they would be exempt from quarantine.
London's justification was that the risk of infection was much less in the archipelagos, but that it could not lift the restriction for only part of the country due to the freedom of movement between the islands and mainland Portugal.
The prime ministers of Scotland and Wales considered the corridor process “chaotic”, citing a lack of national coherence and coordination, and only joined later, with the difference that Scotland also excluded Spain and Serbia.
An eventual decision by the British government to include Portugal in the list of corridors applies only to England, with the remaining nations (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) having the option of accepting or not the change.
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