Travelers arriving in France from South Africa and having a complete vaccination schedule are no longer subject to a ten-day quarantine, according to a decree published on Thursday, January 6. 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 their departure from South Africa, a negative PCR or antigen test of less than 48 hours for mainland France, and less than 24 hours for overseas territories. In addition, to get to Reunion Island or Mayotte from South Africa, the overriding reason remains mandatory.
South Africa had been placed on the “scarlet red” list just after the announcement, at the end of November, of the detection of Omicron, the new variant of SARS-CoV-2.
Decline of Omicron engaged in South Africa
The South African Foreign Ministry welcomed on Twitter the lifting of these restrictions, which will allow vaccinated South Africans to travel to France without quarantine, but also without a compelling reason to justify.
Several countries, including the United Kingdom, 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 again recorded an unprecedented number of contaminations on Wednesday (335,000 new cases in twenty-four hours), 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 an increase “Marginal” 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 inhabitants, and more than 91,000 deaths.
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