Travellers who were vaccinated in the UAE after months on the red list in the U.K.

The Secretary of Transport Grant Shaps said on Wednesday that the UK will accept passengers who will be vaccinated in the United Arab Emirates from October 4th. After months of preventing people from the UAE with expensive and strict hotel quarantine requirements, the UK will reopen. A popular travel route.

Sharps said on Twitter: “After their vaccination app is updated, we will accept the UAE vaccination certificate from October 4.” This is great news for international travel, business promotion and family reunion.”

The news gave a sigh of relief to many people in the desert emirate where 10 million expats are the majority. At least 150,000 of them are British citizens. They have been unable to visit their families since the United Kingdom placed the UAE on the travel red list in January last year.

Amy Saraireh, a British national living in Dubai, told CNBC in response to the news: “I am very happy with the carefree thought of visiting my family and poor grandpa.”

The red list means that travelers from the UAE—including British citizens and people who have been vaccinated in the UAE—must be quarantined at a hotel designated by the British government for 10 days if they want, at a personal cost of close to £2,000. Enter the country.

In the spring, tens of thousands of people living in the UAE signed a petition asking the British government to change the name of their travel, citing the country’s high Covid vaccination rate. But the British government refused to make changes, viewing the UAE’s status as a popular tourism hub as a risk, even though the case of delta variants swept the UK at the time.

Dubai International Airport was named the busiest airport in terms of passenger traffic in 2019, and the Dubai-London route is one of the most popular routes for Dubai’s flagship airline Emirates.

The UAE has one of the highest rates of coronavirus vaccination in the world. The country’s vaccine drive relies heavily on China-made Sinopharm vaccines. Compared with vaccines produced elsewhere, there are doubts about the effectiveness of this vaccine. At the same time, breakthrough cases have also surged among people vaccinated with vaccines made in the United States and Europe.

It is not clear whether travelers who receive the Sinpoharm vaccine will fall into the same category as travelers who receive vaccines approved by the United Kingdom (such as those developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca).

The change in travel rules will take place after the start of the Dubai Expo 2020 flagship event, which started on October 1, but was postponed for a year due to the pandemic. It will last six months, and the emirate hopes to attract 25 million visitors to the event, which comes after Covid has stalled global mobility for a year and a half.