Covid-19: France lifts the quarantine for vaccines arriving from South Africa

Europe 1 with AFP 6:52 p.m., January 6, 2022

Travelers arriving in France from South Africa and having a complete anti-Covid-19 vaccine schedule are no longer subject to a ten-day quarantine, according to a decree published on Thursday.

South Africa moving from the "scarlet red" category to the "red" category, the ten-day quarantine remains mandatory only for travelers whose vaccination schedule is not complete.

Travelers are still required to present, before departure from South Africa, an RT-PCR or negative antigen test of less than 48 hours for mainland France, less than 24 hours for overseas territories.

Compelling reason required to travel to Reunion Island and Mayotte

In addition, to get to Reunion Island or Mayotte from South Africa, the overriding reason remains mandatory. South Africa was placed on the scarlet red list just after the announcement in late November of the detection of Omicron. This highly contagious variant, whose multiple mutations have raised fears of vaccine resistance, had triggered a worldwide panic. The South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs welcomed on Twitter the lifting of this restrictions, which will allow vaccinated South Africans to travel to France without quarantine but also without a compelling reason to justify.

Several countries, including Great Britain, the United States and Germany had already relaxed their restrictions on travelers from southern Africa in recent weeks. These decisions followed the realization that vaccines provided fairly effective protection against Omicron, an otherwise widely distributed variant in the world.

While France reached a record 335,000 new Covid infections on Wednesday, South Africa, which undoubtedly tests far less, had only 11,000 new cases.

The South African government announced at the end of December that it had passed the peak of its Omicron wave, with only a "marginal" increase in deaths and no alarming change in terms of hospitalizations.

Officially the country most affected by the pandemic in Africa, it has already identified 3.5 million cases, out of a population of 59 million, and more than 91,000 deaths.