South Africa’s vaccine
passport: Have jab, can travel, except to the UK and US
Daily
Maverick - 18 September 2021
Anger as United Kingdom keeps South Africa on red
status despite government lobbying.
Britain’s
decision to leave South Africa on its Covid-19 red list of countries from which
citizens may not enter the UK – while removing eight other countries from the
list – has caused outrage.
Transport
Secretary Grant Shapps announced on Friday night that his government was
removing Turkey, Pakistan, the Maldives, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Oman, Bangladesh and
Kenya from the list and simplifying procedures for foreigners to enter. But SA
stayed on the list despite furious campaigning by Pretoria and business to get
it off.
David
Frost, CEO of Satsa, who has been leading the campaign, told DM168 on
Friday that Shapps’ decision was “scandalous and completely unacceptable”.
Frost said the decision was based on obsolete Covid-19 infection data and bad
interpretation of the science.
He said
Shapps seemed to have based his decision on his well-known insistence that the
Beta variant largely emanates from South Africa, which was anachronistic
information dating from last December.
“We would
want to know how Kenya was taken off the list. We know their genomic sequencing
is just about nonexistent compared to ours. We do the good science,” Frost
said, adding that he believed South Africa was unfairly paying the price for
that science.
Elsewhere
Covid-19 vaccinations are becoming health passports for South African tourists
to other holiday destinations such as France, Germany, Switzerland and Greece.
But the UK – the biggest source of inbound tourists – and the US remain shut to
South African tourists and their own returning nationals. Britons who travel to
SA have to endure 10 days of quarantine on their return, which has effectively
killed the market, and is costing SA about R26-million a day, the tourist
industry says.
The loss
of British tourism has already cost SA R2.4-billion in lost revenue since it
was put on the list in May, according to the World Travel & Tourism
Council. The UK has traditionally been SA’s biggest source market for tourists.
More than 430,000 British travellers arrived in SA in 2019. During the
complete shutdown of international travel from April to December 2020, UK arrivals
dropped by 97%.
International
Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor joined in the campaign to
persuade Britain to take SA off the red list. This week she raised the issue
again with the new British Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss at a closed online
meeting of Commonwealth foreign ministers, said Pandor’s spokesperson, Lunga
Ngqengelele.
“She
raises it at every opportunity,” he said. The minister did this on behalf of SA
and the many other African countries on the red list.
Pandor
told Radio 702 this week: “South Africa has made good progress through the
third wave and its health system has shown that it is able to cope with the
challenge. We are relaying this to our counterparts in the UK and we hope that
very soon sense will prevail.
“South
Africa is a major destination for tourists from the UK and for tourists from
South Africa to the UK. I think there is a lot of protest arriving at the table
of the Prime Minister as well as the Secretary of State,” Pandor added.
Frost
told DM168 that SA is being punished in part because its good Covid-19
scientists made discoveries that are not being properly interpreted to the
world. He is furious about reports that SA could become a Covid-19 “mutation
factory”. The reports arise from the work of bioinformatics professor Tulio de
Oliveira, who runs gene-sequencing programmes at two South African
universities.
He told
an immunology conference on 30 August that South Africa’s 8.2 million
HIV-positive people were immune-compromised and therefore able to harbour the
coronavirus for longer, allowing it to mutate as it reproduced.
“You have
this massive virus evolution, really the virus accumulating over 30 mutations,”
De Oliveira was quoted as saying. Frost said this message was amplified in the
UK and elsewhere and was being taken up by British “hawks” trying to keep SA on
the red list. He believes that many uncontextualised interpretations of the
scientific position in SA are being used against the country.
The
evidence clearly points to South Africa being removed from the red list. If the
UK government wants to retain the integrity of its traffic light system, it
must reward countries which empirically demonstrate they are safe by granting
them amber status.
He noted
that the UK imposed its outright ban on SA in December after SA had detected
the Beta variant of Covid-19, as though that was about to take over the world.
Since then, the Delta variant has completely overtaken the Beta variant and is
also dominant in the UK.
Frost
pointed out that SA’s average number of daily new Covid-19 infections had
halved over the past two weeks. Its infection rate is less than a quarter of
the UK’s and lower than most EU countries on the UK’s amber list (which allows
entry to tourists but with quarantines).
Frost
said calls were mounting in the UK for South Africa to be removed from the
list. For example, in the Independent, in a joint statement on behalf of the
South African tourism industry, Ben Bradshaw MP, Lord Oates and Baroness
Chalker said: “The evidence clearly points to South Africa being removed from
the red list. If the UK government wants to retain the integrity of its traffic
light system, it must reward countries which empirically demonstrate they are
safe by granting them amber status.”
Frost
noted that aggressive lobbying, in a big government campaign, got India
off the list. The South African government, in tandem with business
organisations like his and Business Leadership South Africa, had gone in to bat
for SA, but much more was needed.
The UK
and US increasingly look out of step as other tourist destinations rapidly open
up to vaccinated South Africans. France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, Spain
and Greece are among European countries that recently dropped quarantine
requirements and opened their doors to South African tourists who have been
vaccinated. Others are expected to follow soon.
Yet
China, Russia, India, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Turkey and others are
allowing entry to South African tourists only if they endure long and often
expensive quarantine periods.
A South
African woman who holds a British passport and had to return to the UK to visit
her elderly mother described the costs, inconvenience and confusion of
navigating the UK’s Covid-19 regulations and restrictions.
She had
to book a package in advance that included 10 nights in a quarantine
hotel, with three meals a day, and two PCR tests, for a total of about R35,000.
The price was fixed and she had no choice of hotel. When she arrived at
Heathrow Airport she and the other travellers from SA were directed to Terminal
5, which was dedicated to processing arrivals from red list countries. From
there the travellers were entirely in the hands of officials who transported
them to their hotels and kept them under effective guard there.
Their
meals were brought to their rooms, which they could not leave, apart from short
periods of exercise in the hotel parking lot. If they needed to leave their
rooms for any other reason, they could only do so with permission – and under
guard.
The
United States is also still barring entry of South African tourists, though
other categories of traveller may be permitted if the US deems this to be “in
the national interest”. South Africa is on a list of 33 forbidden source
countries, which includes all those in Europe’s Schengen area, as well as the
UK, Ireland, Brazil, China, India and Iran.
Numbers
of tourists moving between South Africa and those European countries opening up
to vaccinated South Africans have slowly started to pick up, according to a
Johannesburg-based travel agent.
And some
South African tourists visiting those countries are using them as a back door
to other European members of the Schengen visa regime that are not yet open to
South Africans, like the Netherlands and Italy, diplomatic sources told DM168.
This is because no immigration restrictions apply between Schengen countries.
The
Johannesburg travel agent said that Schengen-area immigration officials were
starting to get wise to this and demanding proof of the departure country of
travellers across Schengen borders.
A
diplomatic source said that South Africans travelling to France should also
take care to register for the Passe Sanitaire, which certifies their
vaccination status and is required for entry to restaurants, planes and
regional trains, as well as all venues accommodating 50 people or more. This
pass is an App with a QR code.
Other
European countries have equivalents.
The agent
also pointed out the hazards that shifting red list restrictions presented to
travellers to destinations such as the UK. Some travellers are choosing to do
their quarantines in other countries, such as in Ireland, before entering the
UK. The Johannesburg travel agent told DM168 that, because of the
uncertainties and variations of travel to Europe, many South Africans are
instead choosing to holiday in Africa. Egypt requires only a recent negative
Covid-19 PCR test, as do most countries closer to home, such as Zimbabwe,
Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Eswatini, Mozambique and Ethiopia.
This week
the Seychelles took South Africa off its restricted list, meaning South
Africans may visit the archipelago with only a recent negative PCR test
certificate. Mauritius will take South Africa off its restricted list on 1
October. Vaccinated travellers will be allowed to roam freely across the island
immediately. Those without vaccinations will still have to undergo quarantine
in an official quarantine hotel for 14 days.
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