On Monday, Germany lifted a ban from travellers of India, the UK, and three other countries, where the delta variant of coronavirus was found in the samples of COVID-19.
In fact, the variant is the dominant one found in the UK which scuttled the Boris Johnson government’s plan to open up the country.
The Robert Koch Institute, which is a German Federal Government Agency responsible for disease control and prevention, said that India, Nepal, Russia, Portugal and the UK had been downgraded to high incidence areas from the current categorisation of areas of variant concerns, it would make entering the country easier for travellers who were not a resident of Germany.
Regardless of vaccination status, the rules in Germany only allows its citizens to enter the country from variant nations and would also have to go through a two-week quarantine.
The high incidence areas status would allow the travellers from these countries to enter Germany only if they test negative on arriving in Germany and would undergo a 10 days quarantine on arrival, the period could also be shortened to five if the test results for COVID-19 are negative. The new norms would start working from Wednesday.
Jens Spahn, German Health Minister, said in the previous week that the federal government would look into the situation for allowing the travellers from the delta variant to hit countries in the upcoming days.
First discovered in India, the relaxation in curbs had been driven by the fact that the vaccines were found effective against the delta variant.
Angela Merkel, German Chancellor, on Friday, said that they thought that in the foreseeable future people would be travel again without going into quarantine only if they had received double jabs.
Dubai in the previous month eased restrictions on Indian Travellers who had received both the doses of UAE-approved COVID-19 vaccines, such as Sputnik V, Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinopharm, and Oxford-AstraZeneca.
However, the passengers from India have been requested to undergo a rapid PCR test four hours prior to departure to Dubai and on arrival in Dubai, and on arrival, the passengers must undergo quarantine until the results are received.
