BREAKING: England to lift COVID-19 quarantine on travellers returning from islands after infuriating Spain with whole-country approach

THE UK is expected to announce today that future quarantines on travellers returning to England will make exemptions for islands less affected by COVID-19 than the mainlands they belong to.

According to Sky News, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps is expected to reveal the measure later today.

But the announcement appears to have come too late for Spain’s islands which were left infuriated by the surprise imposition of a two-week quarantine for returning British tourists.

The blanket measure was adopted for the whole of Spain, despite the fact that the Canary and Balearic Islands had a very low COVID-19 incidence rate.

In fact at the time, it only was regions like Madrid and Catalunya in the north east of the mainland which were seeing a concerning resurgence of the virus.

England follows in the footsteps of Wales which last week exempted some Portuguese islands from its quarantine list.

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Laurence Dollimore

Laurence Dollimore is a Spanish-speaking, NCTJ-trained journalist with almost a decade’s worth of experience.
The London native has a BA in International Relations from the University of Leeds and and an MA in the same subject from Queen Mary University London.
He earned his gold star diploma in multimedia journalism at the prestigious News Associates in London in 2016, before immediately joining the Olive Press at their offices on the Costa del Sol.
After a five-year stint, Laurence returned to the UK to work as a senior reporter at the Mail Online, where he remained for two years before coming back to the Olive Press as Digital Editor in 2023.
He continues to work for the biggest newspapers in the UK, who hire him to investigate and report on stories in Spain.
These include the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Mail Online, Mail on Sunday and The Sun and Sun Online.
He has broken world exclusives on everything from the Madeleine McCann case to the anti-tourism movement in Tenerife.

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