The UK government have announced the removal of Nigeria and other West African countries from their International travel red list, which initially restricts flight from Nigeria to land in any UK airport. UK’s health secretary, Sajid Javid, announced this on Tuesday. when he briefed the British Parliament

 

Javid told lawmakers at the briefing that England on Wednesday, 04:00 GMT remove all 11 countries from it’s red list from which restricts flight from those countries from coming to the UK. He stressed that the red list is no longer an effective tool to curb the spreading of Omicrom, the new variant of covid. In his words;

 

“So I can announce today that whilst we’ll maintain our temporary testing measures for international travel, we will be removing all 11 countries from the travel red list effective from 4am tomorrow.”

 
 
 

Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe are currently on the list.

 

This development was also confirmed Grant Shapps, UK’s transport Secretary, who took to Twitter to announce that lifting of the ban, and further explaining that it’ll take effect on Wednesday. In his tweet.

 

“From 4am on Weds 15 Dec, ALL 11 countries will be removed from England’s travel red. All current TESTING measures remain in place & will be reviewed in the first week of January,” 

 
 
 

“As always, we keep all our travel measures under review and we may impose new restrictions should there be a need to do so to protect public health.”

 

It is believed that UK removing Nigeria from it’s international travels red list was as a result of the Federal Government threatened to reciprocate the travel ban on UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and on any country that discriminated against Nigeria due to Omicron.

 
 

Buk the UK government through it’s health secretary, Sajid Javid, stressed that the removal of red list was because the variant is already in the UK, therefore it is no longer an effective strategy to curb the spread.

 
 
 

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