Vaccination is growing all over the planet, albeit patchy.
With this positive trend, the European Commission thinks that the time has come to start reopening the external borders of the European Union.
Obviously, the thought is towards the summer holidays and about restarting the world from that dramatic moment in February 2020 when the WHO launched the pandemic message and all continents closed their borders.
Brussels yesterday approved a draft recommendation to member states to lift restrictions on non-essential travel for unvaccinated people who want to travel to Europe.
The decision was made taking into account the most recent scientific advice showing that immunization is crucial in breaking the chain of transmission.
The proposal will have to be approved by the European Council of 27 member states by the end of May, to enter into force at the beginning of June.
The measure, which moves in parallel with the digital green certificate, aims to tear down the walls created by the Coronavirus within the EU and proposes that countries “remove the temporary limitation on non-essential travel to the EU to regarding third-country nationals who received the last dose of one of the Covid-19 vaccines authorized in the EU, at least 14 days before entering the Schengen zone. In any case, the regulation also aims to go a step further in opening up, opening the borders to travelers arriving from third countries where immunization has been carried out with any of the injections that appear on the World Health Organization (WHO) emergency list. Among them there is not yet the Russian Sputnik V vaccine or the Chinese Sinovac and Sinopharm.
There is also an attempt to reopen the European borders to those countries with an infection rate of less than 100 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the last 14 days, regardless of whether the tourists of those territories are immunized or not.
Until now, health recommendations have been to close access to those countries with more than 25 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
At the moment only seven countries can be open to non-essential travel but the goal is to reach “liberation” to travel to over 100 countries by the summer.
A European spokesperson confirmed that, at the moment, only Israel would be “safe”, while the United Kingdom and the United States “would not be completely safe yet”.
The new epidemiological threshold will continue to be combined with other criteria such as the ratio between the CRP tests per inhabitant and the positivity ratio of these tests does not exempt, at the moment, any quarantines or swabs before the trip.
Brussels assured that the new proposal follows the “principle of reciprocity” even if it will not be easy or immediate to achieve what is called a “gradual convergence” in recognizing the various vaccination certificates.
However, the Commission is still worried about the risk of variants and is ready to activate an immediate halt to these opening measures in cases of regrowth of infections. In this way, Member States will be able to take urgent and time-limited measures to react quickly. In short, a free all but with the sword of Damocles of immediate closures where there will be areas of new infections.