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Amber-plus list: Why were extra travel restrictions imposed on France?



France is being taken off the amber-plus list. This SLOTXO means that, from 8 August, people who arrive in England from France will no longer have to isolate if they have been fully vaccinated.

But there has been criticism of a lack of transparency about the data used to put it on the amber-plus list in the first place.

The government said it had brought in the extra restrictions - from 19 July - because of "the persistent presence of cases in France of the Beta variant, which was first identified in South Africa".

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) wrote to the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC), which advised ministers on the decision, complaining about a lack of transparency in the process. Labour has also called for more data.


Tracking variants
The OSR said the JBC had used international data from Gisaid- a website hosted in Germany that promotes rapid sharing of data about coronavirus (including variants).

We don't know exactly when the JBC was looking at the Gisaid data while it was assessing the risk from France but during July the French data was updated.

Professor Sylvia Richardson, chair of biostatistics at the University of Cambridge, says some of the figures from France have been revised downwards.


How much of the variant is on Reunion?
Reunion is a French island in the Indian Ocean, about 5,800 miles (9,300km) away from Paris. If you look at the figures for the last four weeks, 84% of sequenced positive tests in Reunion have found the Beta variant.

Clearly, if Reunion's results were included in mainland France (for which the proportion of sequenced positive tests with Beta variant was 0.8%) it would have made a big difference to what the JBC was seeing.

On 29 July, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told BBC News the decision was "based on the prevalence of the so-called Beta variant, in particular in the Reunion bit of France, which of course is away from the mainland".