Portugal slams United kingdom determination to go away it off quarantine record as 'absurd'

(CNN) — The Portuguese government has denounced the British government’s final decision not to carry quarantine for people traveling from mainland Portugal as “absurd” and “senseless,” expressing the British isles has 7 situations more coronavirus conditions than it does.

Augusto Santos Silva, the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, reported Portugal was “incredibly unhappy” to have been excluded from a list of nations around the world from which travelers will be exempt from expending two weeks in isolation immediately after arriving in England.

The exemption checklist, which was released by the British isles govt on Friday and will arrive into impact on July 10, contains 59 states and 14 British Overseas Territories.

Talking to BBC Radio 4 on Friday, Santos Silva said: “We are quite disappointed with this choice of the British authorities. We feel it truly is senseless and unfair. It really is pretty absurd.

“The United Kingdom has seven periods a lot more circumstances connected to Covid-19 than Portugal, so we think this is not the way in which allies and good friends are handled,” he included.

Though he acknowledged that Portugal has professional some “particular outbreaks” of Covid-19 in Lisbon, the minister pressured that destinations well known with British visitors — such as the Algarve — have been not coronavirus hotspots.

António Costa, the Prime Minister of Portugal, also mentioned the Algarve was a safe and sound spot to devote a holiday getaway this summer time.

In a tweet posted on Friday, Costa bundled a graph comparing the range of Covid-19 situations in the British isles unfavourably to those people in the Algarve, adding the words and phrases: “You are welcome to expend a harmless getaway in Algarve.”

Overall health authorities in Portugal have so considerably recorded 1,587 deaths from coronavirus in all settings. In accordance to Johns Hopkins University, 44,216 persons have died from the virus in the Uk.

In accordance to British isles governing administration details, around 2.5 million Britons traveled to Portugal past 12 months.

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CNN’s Isabela Tejera and Milena Veselinovic contributed reporting.