“We have to look at the rate of positivity, if we don’t end up punishing the countries that are doing the right thing,” says the British minister about Portugal.



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The British Transport Minister said on Friday that the privileged criterion in the analysis of the list of safe countries, exempt from quarantine upon return to the country, was the positivity rate. Grant Shapps recalled that when the country includes Portugal in this list, the positivity rate in Portugal was 1.8%, and this week it was 1.6%.

The official told the BBC that this was “a very important fact because we do not want to exclude countries for doing the right thing and doing a lot of testing.”

Until now, the UK had prioritized the number of positive cases per 100,000 inhabitants, placing countries with more than 20 cases per 100,000 inhabitants on the ‘black list’. The official recalled that there are “a large number of tests to be carried out in Portugal” and that this “tends to increase the figures.”

“We have to look at the positivity rate, if we do not end up punishing the countries that are doing the right thing,” he emphasized.

As for the Minister of Health of Wales, a region that decreed that everyone who returns from mainland Portugal would have to comply with forty mandatory -this situation does not apply to those who return from the Azores or Madeira-, said that the situation in Portugal is “ very clear “.

“There is a level of risk where we normally make decisions to introduce quarantine and I do not think it is consistent not to do so,” he also told the BBC, explaining that the non-mandatory quarantine for returnees from the archipelagos is linked to “a different classification “. and because they have evidence at the entrance ”, he explained.



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