Scarborough woman who moved to Portugal reacts to travel test changes
Pre-departure Covid testing before travelling abroad has been scrapped from today
A woman from Scarborough says the removal of pre-departure Covid tests before travelling abroad is great news.
It has been scrapped from today for anyone arriving into England along with the need to take a PCR post-arrival from Sunday, as travellers will have to take lateral flow tests instead.
The Government says the widespread nature of the Omicron variant means the temporary measures have "outlived" their usefulness.
Margaret Inglesant moved from Scarborough to Portugal to run a villa there. She said:
"It's really good they're removing the day 2 PCR test with quarantine because we found that really difficult. When we came over to the UK at Christmas time because we had to quarantine we had to change our flights so we had to add extra time in to add the quarantine in, so that was the difficult bit and obviously there's still a lateral flow test to do on day 2.
"I think it's about time they start thinking about removing lateral flow tests because I don't know any other countries in Europe that make you do those on day 2. There's still a lot of countries that make you do the test when you enter and some of them make you quarantine, but I just think we need to start managing it and make people do their own lateral flow tests and manage it themselves.
"One of our daughters, fingers crossed, has booked to come for a weekend but it's all still up in the air. Nobody knows for sure do they? I'd like to come back to the UK a bit more often in 2022 and look after the grandchildren for a while but they can't really rely on me because they don't know how it's going to be impacted.
"There's still that question mark but I think it's getting better which is good news. It's good news we're taking a step in that direction and there's lots of common sense starting to prevail I think and they know a bit more about it now, which a year and two years ago we didn't know anything about it. We're getting there slowly and it's been a bit more optimistic. It's just learning to live with it.
"I just think that people should be optimistic. I think we can see the signs and it's a great start to the New Year. Tourism has been hit hard and I think all the Governments across the world know that, their own economies and they're going to have to do something and I think we should be optimistic and take that chance."