Government lateral flow day 2 test mess
In the most unsurprising news, today the government launched its portal showing the companies that are offering the new lateral flow day 2 tests. From today you are officially able to book the new day 2 tests. The PCR one you may have bought before is also still acceptable.
Prior to lateral flow tests becoming a day 2 test possibility, I would expect to pay around £20-40 for a lateral flow test for travel. As a reminder, many airlines do discount codes which you can find more about here. You usually don’t even need to be travelling with the airline to use the code.
I can now see tests from just £12 but obviously, it doesn’t mean the company is reliable. With a day 2 test, timing is less important as you just need the booking reference for your PLF, if things take a bit longer afterwards with the company, it does not appear to be monitored. Obviously if you were concerned about whether you actually had Covid you can always use a free NHS one for your own piece of mind.
Currently, the site has crashed, quelle surprise! However, you don’t need to use the government site to find approved testers. I use the Covid Testing Network Comparison site to find testing that is the cheapest close to me or for postal tests.
Barbados removes arrivals tests & quarantine
Barbados has always been one of the most regulated countries in the Caribbean, but until recently cases had been fairly low. Now that the Delta variant seems to have taken hold and most transmission is in the community rather than from tourists, they have decided to relAX THE RULES FOR fully vaccinated travellers.
You still need to do a PCR test before departure (make sure you look at the requirements for the tests as they are much stricter than other places, but if you are fully vaccinated you no longer have to have a test on arrival or quarantine until the results. Those unvaccinated have to quarantine for 5 days and then have a second test (after the initial one before departure). This also takes away most of the risk of being told to isolate because they found someone on your flight who tested positive for Covid on arrival.
You can find the full protocols here. If you fancy going you can see my Barbados reviews here.
Switzerland no longer accepts NHS app for indoor activities
I went to Switzerland in August and it was a great place to visit apart from the price of things. At the time it was extremely simple to enter Switzerland just using the NHS app if fully vaccinated and no proof was required to gain entry to anywhere.
You can still use the NHS app to enter the country, but you also need proof of vaccination to enter most indoor public areas such as restaurants, bars and clubs plus waterparks, and big outdoor events with more than 1,000 people. For some reason, they decided to make things more complicated. Currently, you can use the NHS app to enter places. But from 25 October foreign vaccination certificates will no longer be valid for entry to these places. Anyone wanting to attend indoor or large outdoor events will need to apply for a Swiss COVID Certificate, at a cost of about £24 per person. The EU Digital COVID Pass will also be accepted, so you could try and get the Irish version of this which accepts the UK vaccination status.
Applications or a Swiss COVID Certificate could take up to two weeks to process so visitors are being advised to apply ASAP. Children under 16 are exempt.
This seems pretty unfair to make people wait up to 2 weeks to be able to get a pass. If they want to allow people in on compassionate grounds these people then are unlikely to be able to go to any public places if it was a short notice trip. Plus business trips that are often last-minute will also be in jeopardy.
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Do we know if the French TAC app pass is accepted in Switzerland? Thanks 🙂
It says EU Covid pass so if that’s an EU Covid pass then yes.
The french pass works in Switzerland, but only if you had a vaccine in France. It doesn’t work if you loaded your U.K./NHS vaccine Cert into the french app. This only works in France.
Thanks Michelle, that seems all very petty on the part of the Swiss.
The Irish app works with the NHS certificates – it takes some finding but it is here: https://covidtracker.ie/
Equally, I have found the French app very useful throughout Europe and it also is hard to find but it’s here for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.gouv.android.stopcovid&hl=en_GB&gl=US
The only small problem with using other apps is the UK certificate, for some reason best known to our disordered government, expires after 28 days, so far I have found the French app remains current but I have had to reload the Irish one a couple of times.
Thanks for the info James that’s really useful.
Thanks James for this – I’ve just been able to upload my NHS vaccination proof to the Irish app thanks to your post – one thing off my checklist today – thank you!
We are in France and the French anti Covid app takes on board the NHS QR code, which is scanned every time you go to a bar cafe etc, even outdoors ones. The UK code expires as someone has said, but renews upon opening
We decided to leave the EU so we are left scrambling for work-arounds and having to make complex travel plans.
‘We’ didn’t!
A number of people were persuaded to vote for it and I still maintain they were either very wealthy or very stupid! What’s also clear is that few of the people who championed leave understood what the European Union was and does.
£20-£40 for a LFT is a complete rip-off. Thankfully many enterprising companies are already offering them at £1, showing the whole thing is a complete joke.
I was in Zurich last week and took my UK NHS vaccination certificates to a pharmacy recommended by the Tourist Office at the Hauptbahnhof. They generated a Swiss COVID certificate with a QR code on it for me on the spot, for 49CHF. I was then able to install the Swiss COVID app on my phone and scan the QR code, and hey presto, I was street legal. It all was relatively simple to do, just a bit of a hassle on the 1st day there, but at least it is valid for a year now.
That’s very useful.
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