Europe’s ‘green list’: much of continent in lowest risk category

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

Much of continental Europe and Scandinavia is now in the lowest risk green category, according to the latest data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

The map of the European Union – plus Norway and Iceland – shows large swathes of the region in green.

Under the ECDC’s classification, this is the lowest risk category, based on new Covid infection rates of below 50 per 100,000 people over a two-week spell – or cases at no more than 74 and positivity rates of less than 4 per cent.

Eastern Europe is almost entirely low risk, from the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria – though data from Hungary is missing.

Greece is mainly green, except for the area around Athens and some islands – including Crete and Rhodes – which are in the medium risk amber category.

In western Europe, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria are all green – as is Italy, apart from the far north east where data is unavailable.

The Netherlands has large patches of amber and both Ireland and Luxembourg are regarded as medium risk.

The data appeared three days before the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, is due to make the latest round of changes to the UK government’s “traffic light” classification system.

Mr Shapps is under pressure to increase the number of green countries on the UK list from which no quarantine is necessary.

On Monday 19 July, rules from nations “amber” countries will be eased, with arriving travellers who have been fully vaccinated by the NHS allowed to avoid quarantine.

Tim White, the Covid data specialist, said: “There are many central European families separated, and businesses affected by the amber listing of countries with very low infection rates.

“It’s easy to forget how many UK residents are not fully vaccinated yet, so green list additions are still important. Poland and Slovakia are the two obvious candidates with low rates.

“There has been concern about Slovakia’s lack of genomic sequencing ability, but the EU has been helping, and other criteria are fulfilled so if I was on the committee I would certainly be recommending Slovakia is given the green light on Thursday.”

On the ECDC chart most of Spain is red – indicating a high risk – apart for the centre of the country around Madrid and the northwestern autonomous community of Galicia, which are amber.

Portugal is also amber, except for the island of Madeira – which is green. It is the one part of Portugal that is on the UK’s green list.

The only very high risk location is Cyprus, which is also the only location in Europe with higher rates of new infections than the UK.

The trigger for this category is 500 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people in 14 days.