Amber-plus list: Why were extra travel restrictions imposed on France?
- Published
France is being taken off the amber-plus list. This 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, external 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, external 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, external- 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.
"At some point, France, in its own reporting, was not distinguishing between mainland France and its territories, such as Reunion," she said.
"That would have made the numbers look high."
She adds that the error was corrected by French authorities on 15 July.
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".
When it was pointed out that Reunion is a long way away, Mr Raab said: "It's not the distance that matters it's the ease of travel between different component parts of any individual country."
The day after Mr Raab's interview, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told BBC News that it wasn't about Reunion. "It was actually the Beta variants they were picking up from France."
Currently, only travellers who have been vaccinated and who have important personal, health or professional reasons that cannot be postponed are allowed to travel from Reunion to France.
Air France is operating two flights a day from Reunion to Paris and there are also direct flights being operated by Air Austral, Corsair and Air Caraibes.
Reunion has one of the world's most active volcanoes
It's worth pointing out that Reunion is currently on the government's normal amber list, external, meaning it faces less strict travel rules than mainland France.
But from 8 August, Reunion is being added to the UK's travel-ban red list.
What about other variants in France?
Scientists have questioned why the JBC was so concerned about the Beta variant in the first place.
"I'm not so worried about the Beta variant because it can't compete with the Delta variant," Professor Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, told Reality Check.
"When you look at countries that had a lot of Beta, as soon Delta came along it started outperforming it."
If you look at this chart of variants in France, you can see how quickly the Delta variant, which was first identified in India, became the dominant variant in France, and that there was relatively little of the Beta variant.
Another thing to bear in mind when looking at the prevalence of variants is that it depends on how much of the genome sequencing required to detect variants is being done.
Look at the figures for weeks beginning 14 June and 21 June, for example, which is the sort of period that might have been available to the JBC when it was advising the government on the amber-plus decision.
In those two weeks, the number of Beta variant samples detected in France almost doubles - but the number of positive tests that were sequenced there increased by a factor of 2.5, which means the proportions of positive tests that showed the Beta variant actually fell.
But again, it must be remembered that these figures are subject to revision, so what we see on the database today is not necessarily what the JBC was seeing.
Mary Gregory, from the OSR, criticised the lack of transparency in the data used by the JBC.
"While the data were publicly available, we do not consider that they were easy to find or clear," she said.
A JBC spokesperson told BBC News it was "committed to working in a transparent way that promotes public confidence and will always seek to be as clear and open as possible".
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