New EU Travel Map To Be Based On Vaccination Rates?

The European Union’s public health agency is proposing a revision of COVID-19 rules which could ease travel for vaccinated people and drop a colour-coded system that limits trips to and from areas with high levels of infections, Euractiv.com reports.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) made its non-binding proposal at meetings of EU health specialists this week, This is part of a discussion about how to open up travel further as vaccination rates increase.

The ECDC has colour-coded EU regions from green to yellow and red according to their rates of COVID-19 notifications and testing and percentage of positive tests. The EU has broadly tailored travel restrictions according to the colour.

Now it seems that the travel restrictions did not have a significant impact on reducing transmissions, hospitalisations or deaths.

According to Euractiv.com, the ECDC gave a number of options for change, including using vaccine uptake as an indicator, which might encourage inoculations. However, vaccination is uneven in the EU countries, from 85,2% in Portugal to 28,4% in Romania and 19,4% in Bulgaria.