The united states are expected to relax travel restrictions on vaccinated passengers from the European Union and Britain the new rules are expected to come into effect from November let’s hear more on this from
our Washington correspondent Gary Donoghue and not a moment too soon many will say Gary yeah I think there’ll be a lot of relief in Europe and the UK obviously in Ireland for this change because up until now
there’s been a sort of asymmetry to the travel restrictions in other words Americans have been able to travel to Europe and the UK pretty easily providing they took tests and were vaccinated etc
that wasn’t true the other way around for the last 18 months most British people have not been able to come to us and so that’s been a bone of contention we were expecting perhaps
some change to take place to that back at the g7 meeting in Cornwall didn’t happen they’ve been talking ever since and now they’ve come to an agreement so what happens now from November
if you’re double vaccinated in the UK you’ll have to take a test within three days of travel but you will be able to get on a plane to us and you won’t have to quarantine when you get here now
if you’re a us citizen and you haven’t been vaccinated that actually the restrictions are being tightened for you if you’re outside this country you’d have to take a test within one day of traveling
back home to the united states and then a test when you get here the other thing that travelers from the UK will have to do is give up their mobile phone numbers and emails for contact tracing as
the centers for disease control here is going to institute some sort of contract tracing method and I presume that’s about the dangers of new variants and things like that but the good news
for families that have been separated good news for the tourism industry the airlines have been crying out for this forever and of course, the business has wanted things to open up and has been lobbying hard for this
and finally, the Americans have agreed the new British foreign secretary uh distrust says taken to social media she said if we can have a little look at what she’s said on Twitter excellent news for travelers from the UK to the.s
important for our economic recovery families and trade she says how much of this is down to ongoing diplomatic chats behind the scene Gary as opposed to the science of cover well the interesting thing is there has been
this working group talking about opening things up since the g7 between Europe UK us but nothing really has emerged from it we didn’t really necessarily expect something expectations
were dashed really atg7 and nothing really has emerged since other than that they were sticking to the rules so this is somewhat out of the blue I mean it does help I think in the sense that it not only
you know does the obvious things but of course, America is facing a lot of criticism from some European allies over all sorts of things at the moment not least from the french uh the way they
handled the new up alliance with UK and Australia over the Afghanistan withdrawal so this will help perhaps smooth over some of those problems that they’ve had diplomatically I don’t think that would necessarily
have been the motivating factor but it will certainly help and you know it will normalize things the other thing to point out of course is that the dominant variant here in the united states is the delta variant which is the same as it is in
the UK in the sense you could say what’s the risk particularly as the levels of vaccination are higher in the UK than they are here I think if a new variant emerged Maxine in the UK or Europe
that might change the calculation from the point of view in the UnitedStates they haven’t said that but that would be an obvious thing to think about but as things stand at the moment
they think they can do this whilst keeping the population here safe Gary for the moment thank you very much, Gary Donahue, in Washington Boris Johnson has also been tweeting about
this development he says the easing of u.s travel rules for fully vaccinated travelers is a fantastic boost for business and trade very similar then to what Liz trust is saying they both got the memo adding that it was great that family and friends on both sides of the pond can be reunited once again.
