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Rabat – The UK government published its new travel advisory today for travellers coming to the UK, with Morocco retaining its “amber list” status. The revised list was updated on August 5 in response to new developments in the COVID-19 situation of the home countries of potential visitors to the UK.
Despite rising COVID-19 numbers in Morocco, surpassing 10,000 new daily infections for the first time ever, the UK will not downgrade travellers from Morocco to its dreaded “red list.”
As a country on the Amber list, visitors from Morocco must present a negative COVID-19 test 3 days prior to travelling to the UK, in addition to booking and paying for two additional tests upon arrival. Visitors will be expected to quarantine for 10 days, and take COVID-19 tests on both day 2 and day 8 of their stay in Britain.
By avoiding a red list designation, travellers from Morocco will not be seen by the UK government as posing a “high public health risk to the UK from known variants of concern, known high-risk variants under investigation or as a result of very high in-country or territory prevalence of COVID-19.”
Visitors from countries on the UK’s red list are only allowed into the country if they have residency papers or are a British or Irish National, after which they will need to quarantine in specific “managed hotels.” Countries with high COVID-19 numbers such as Tunisia and Egypt are on the UK’s red list, but Morocco has avoided the designation thus far.
The reason why Morocco has not been reclassified while other North African countries are on the “red list” might be partly epidemiological, and partly political. The new updates for the UK’s travel advisory prompted Parliamentarian Naz Shah to criticize the government for removing India from the red list, while keeping Pakistan on it despite clearly posing less of a COVID-19 threat.
