France on “dark amber” list

[PersephoneJames]

You have to quarantine if coming back from France, doubly vaccinated or not.

@notimagain, the UK government (or the English government, as the other nations stopped following BJ's leadership on this one).

I have more confidence in the French government, honestly. They altogether had probably less than 4 months of lockdown so far? There was always some measurements in place and the case numbers never went up as high as what we have here. Not even in the same scale.

Certainly the senior French politicians who have been at the center of this - Macron, Castex, Veran, have been pretty straight talking and consistent thoughout and though I know to many Mr Macron is globalization/big business personified he can certainly deliver a speech without hesitation, deviation or waffle waffle, though you might not like what he says….

The UK government have been a joke the whole way through. Flip flopping from one thing to the next, largely depending on how the public feel.

We had a trip booked in 2019 for 2020, which was postponed to this year, cancelled it a while ago, then when quarantine was lifted we (overly-optimistically) thought we could go, and paid the balance. Its for 12 family members so a lot of money. Then boom - quarantine bought in a week later. I definitely wouldn't be booking a holiday now for this summer, but some of us are in difficult positions with this from last year or the year before.

We are going to go, pay for day 5 test to release and just pray France doesn't turn red. TBH the whole thing is making me feel sick, but we won't get any money back now.

[quote cooperage]If they are sequencing as a matter of routine, then why aren't they reporting the results to the GISAID?

According to this FT article, only 1% of Covid cases were being sequenced in France in June, vs 30% in the UK:

www.ft.com/content/d4abbe5e-8650-4a76-9fea-2d3efa2ed52b[/quote]
I'm no expert on this, but a lot of the information about how the tests are processed in France uses the word "criblage", which means "screening" rather than "sequencing". I know that at least some of the variants actually show up a slightly different way when they process the PCR tests, so perhaps this is what is meant. Presumably this is enough to identify known variants, or at least work out which samples need full genomic sequencing (but wouldn't be helpful in finding new variants).

@northernlass99, we are very much on the same boat. Booked in 2019 and got pushed to 2021. Just paid in full before this announcement. But we only booked for our small family of 4, not as such a huge deal for 12 like you. It could get worse to become in red list. Hotel quarantine is a NO No, as we have a toddler and a young child. Also France might well ban all Brits into the country when the case number rises to over 100,000 /day. Nobody would stay cool with such a number.