Covid-19: Travel traffic light system being simplified - BBC News
Fully vaccinated people returning to England from non-red list countries will no longer need PCR tests from 4 October.
Over the summer scientists advising the government said the biggest threat to our health security was a coronavirus variant which could spread faster or was resistant to our current vaccines.

We've been bitten by this before. In April the first cases of the Delta variant were spotted in travellers from India. It started spreading quickly and, by June, it had taken over as the dominant form of the virus in the UK. Later studies suggested it was more contagious and more likely to put those infected in hospital.

Detecting new variants was a key reason why all vaccinated travellers had been told to pay for a private PCR test two days after they arrived back home. We were told that those expensive lab tests were needed to genetically sequence the sample and find out if the next potentially more dangerous variant had arrived.

We know that contracting Covid after two doses of a vaccine is still possible, so double jabbed travellers could still bring new variants into the UK.

But critics said that, in reality, the proportion of samples that could be analysed in this way was very low – partly because a certain level of virus was needed for the test to work properly. The latest figures suggest that between 12 August and 1 September only about 25% of positive cases in travellers arriving in the UK were successfully sequenced.

Under the new plans fully vaccinated travellers will instead be able to pay for a cheaper, but less sensitive, lateral flow test which can be taken quickly at home.

LFTs cannot be sequenced so anyone who tests positive will be asked to take a second follow-up PCR lab test, which will be paid for by the NHS.

But there is a worry that without regular, automatic PCR testing of all samples, more variants could slip through the net and weaken our defences against coronavirus in the future.