Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the implications for South Africa's status as a covid-19 red list country of data and genetic sequencing from that country showing the relative prevalence of the Beta and Delta variants of covid-19.

All countries, including South Africa, are continually monitored. The Joint Biosecurity Centre’s (JBC) assessments which inform Ministers’ decisions on red, amber and green categorisation are reviewed every three weeks. The JBC uses a range of factors in its assessments, such as variant prevalence, genomic surveillance capability, virus transmission risk and variants of concern and variants under investigation. The methodology for international travel risk assessment is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-risk-assessment-methodology-to-inform-international-travel-traffic-light-system