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<p>The Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) produces risk assessments of countries and territories.
This risk is based on factors such as the level of community transmission of variants
of concern or variant under investigation, levels of testing, genomic sequencing and
reporting. The JBC assessed that France is a high-risk COVID-19 destination due to
the circulation of variants of concern, most notably the beta variant, which is the
variant that presents the greatest risk for vaccine escape. As of 19 July, GISAID
data shows there have been to date 2,959 cases of beta in France (5.2% of all cases
uploaded) compared to 1,052 cases of beta in the United Kingdom (0.2% of all cases
uploaded), 44 cases in Greece (0.5% of all cases uploaded) and 621 cases in Spain
(1.4% of all cases uploaded), from the start of the pandemic. GISAID is a live repository
and the number of sequences attributed to a specific lineage, country or region may
be revised upwards or downwards as new lineages are identified and countries update
and amend their data. The quarantine rules and testing for travellers into the United
Kingdom from France will significantly decrease the risk of importing beta cases,
which could then grow rapidly into community clusters or outbreaks.</p>
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