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What are the new rules for travelling between Denmark and the UK

From Monday August 2nd, fully vaccinated travellers from the EU and US will be able to travel to the UK without quarantining. But with almost all the UK currently "red", travellers coming to Denmark from the UK still face obstacles.

Published: 28 May 2021 16:42 CEST
Updated: 5 August 2021 10:27 CEST

What are the new rules for travelling between Denmark and the UK

The departure area at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5. Photo: John Sibley/Reuters/Ritzau Scanpix

UK restrictions

From 4am on August 2nd, the UK government any travellers from amber level countries – which include Denmark — arriving in Britain who have been fully inoculated with a vaccine recognised by the European Medical Agency or Swiss vaccination programme (Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, Moderna or Johnson &Johnson) can now skip the mandatory 10 day quarantine.

However, travellers (apart from children under 10) will still need to provide a negative test no more than three days prior to travel.

UK rules allow either a PCR test or an antigen test of more than 97 percent specificity and 80 percent sensitivity – the rapid-result antigen tests available at pharmacies or testing centres around Europe meet this specification but most home-testing kits do not.

Travellers from Denmark to the UK will also still need to take a PCR test on the second day after arriving in the country (apart from children aged 4 and under).

For fully vaccinated travellers, after the new rules take effect, the Day Two test will mark the end of their Covid travel requirements, assuming it comes back negative.

Unvaccinated travellers, however, must quarantine for 10 full days and take another test on or before Day Eight of their stay.

It is important to note that for test and quarantine purposes, the day of arrival is counted as Day Zero. The following day is Day One, the day after that Day Two, and so on.

Proof of purchase of the second test must be included on the passenger locator form, which everyone over age 18 must complete and submit within the 48 hours before they travel. Anyone who fails to take this Day Two test faces a fine of up to £2,000.

And, yes, even if your stay is a short one, before you travel you will need to book and pay for tests for Day Two and – if required because you’re not fully vaccinated at the time of travel – Day Eight.

The UK does accept lateral flow or antigen tests for pre-travel requirements.

People can travel from amber list countries for any reason – there is no need to prove that your trip is essential and entry is not limited to UK nationals or residents.

The UK has confirmed that it will accept the EU Digital Covid Certificate, which is included as part of Denmark’s coronapas app, as proof of vaccination.

READ ALSO:

Denmark restrictions for England, Scotland and Northern Ireland

Denmark on July 17th classified the entire of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland as “red regions”, with only Wales classified as “orange”, meaning all non-essential travel is discouraged for Danish residents.

However, as the UK as a whole is still classified as “orange”, travellers from England, Northern Ireland and Scotland are still not treated as if they are coming from a “red” country.

This means they only need to meet the long list of “worthy purposes” for entering Denmark, which includes most business trips and family visits. You can read more about the specific rules and criteria for fulfilling a worthy purpose here.

In addition, under Denmark’s rules, those who are permanently resident in an OECD country ranked “orange” (such as the UK as a whole) and fully vaccinated or immune can travel to Denmark without a worthy purpose. This means that fully vaccinated or immune people can still travel to Denmark for tourism, wherever in the UK they are travelling from.

The vaccine is treated as valid by Denmark from 14 days after the final dose has been given. Those who have been previously infected are treated as immune from 14 days after a positive PCR test, with the immunity valid for 180 days.

Travellers from England, Scotland and Northern Ireland still face tougher testing and isolation requirements than those travelling from Wales, however.

Unlike travellers from Wales, they have to isolate for up to 10 days on arrival in Denmark, even if vaccinated, and will need to present a negative Covid-19 test less than 72 hours old prior to boarding their flights, and also take another test after entry to Denmark.

Travelling to Denmark from Wales

Travellers from Wales are only required to isolate on arrival in Denmark if they are not vaccinated or immune, or if they have visited a red region (eg, the whole of England, Scotland or Northern Ireland) in the ten days running up to their trip to Denmark.

Vaccinated or immune travellers from from Wales do not need to present a negative Covid-19 test, either before boarding the plane or on arrival in Denmark, but instead need to show proof that they have been fully vaccinated or previously infected.

Travellers from Wales who have not been vaccinated do not need to show a negative PCR test before boarding their plane, but do need to present a negative test less than 72 hours old at the border control in Denmark.

This can either be a negative PCR test less than 72 hours old at the time of entry, or an antigen rapid test less than 48 hours old, which can be obtained for free in Denmark in the arrival halls between your plane and border controls.

Travellers from Wales who have visited England, Scotland or Northern Ireland in the ten days leading up to their trip will need to fulfil the same requirement as travellers from these “red” regions.

The worthy purposes which allow travel from an orange country outside the European Union include:

Work, business, studies etc.
A job in Denmark
Attending a business meeting
Carrying out services or transport goods in or out of Denmark
Being a seaman, aircraft crew member, or a diplomat
Having a job interview in Denmark
Being a pupil or student in Denmark (but only if physical presence is required)
Having a traineeship in Denmark
Attending a folk high school programme
Having an au pair placement

There are also “private matters” which constitute a worthy purpose to enter Denmark. These include:

Being a spouse, live-in partner, parent, grandparent, brother or sister, stepbrother or stepsister, child or grandchild of a person resident in Denmark
Being spouse, live-in partner, parent of a Danish national resident abroad when you are travelling to Denmark together
Being the spouse, live-in partner, child, or stepchild of a person sent by another state who holds a diplomatic passport or a similar document
Being the parent of a minor living in Denmark
Being the primary caregiver of a minor living in Denmark
Being related to or in a relationship with a seriously ill or dying person in Denmark
To participate in the birth of a child
To continue treatment at a healthcare institution
To attend a funeral or burial of immediate family members
Owning property, a boat or a permanent place at a campsite in Denmark

Official guidance on testing and isolation requirements, as well as on the valid reasons for entry from orange countries can be found in English here

Member comments

Andy Burrows - 7 August 2021 at 09:55 CEST

Danes can enter the UK without having to quarantine for 10 days but if I enter Denmark from the UK I will have to quarantine for 10 days. Really unfair because people from the UK still can’t visit their families.
Andy Burrows - 7 August 2021 at 10:08 CEST

Denmark must take the UK of it’s Red List as there are many in the UK like me who have family in DK but are unable to see them without having to quarantine for 10 days.

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FACT CHECK: Did Sweden have lower pandemic mortality than Denmark and Norway?

At one point in May 2020, Sweden had the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world, spurring newspapers like the New York Times and Time Magazine to present the country as a cautionary tale, a warning of how much more Covid-19 could ravage populations if strict enough measures were not applied.

“Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark,” the New York Times reported in July 2020.

An article in Time in October 2020 declared Sweden’s Covid response “a disaster”, citing figures from Johns Hopkins University ranking Sweden’s per capita death rate as the 12th highest in the world.

So there was undisguised glee among lockdown sceptics when Svenska Dagbladet published its data last week showing that in the pandemic years 2020, 2021 and 2022 Sweden’s excess mortality was the lowest, not only in the European Union, but of all the Nordic countries, beating even global Covid-19 success stories, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Versions of the graph or links to the story were tweeted out by international anti-lockdown figures such as Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish sceptic of climate action, and Fraser Nelson, editor of Britain’s Spectator Magazine, while in Sweden columnists like Dagens Nyheter’s Alex Schulman and Svenska Dagbladet’s opinion editor Peter Wennblad showed that Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist who led Sweden’s strategy had been “right all along”.

Excess mortality — the number of people who die in a year compared to the number expected to die based on previous years — is seen by some statisticians as a better measure for comparing countries’ Covid-19 responses, as it is less vulnerable to differences in how Covid-19 deaths are reported.

But are these figures legitimate, where do they come from, and do they show what they purport to show?

Here are the numbers used by SvD in its chart:

Where do the numbers come from?

Örjan Hemström, a statistician specialising in births and deaths at Sweden’s state statistics agency Statistics Sweden (SCB), put together the figures at the request of Svenska Dagbladet.

He told The Local that the numbers published in the newspaper came from him and had not been doctored in any way by the journalists.

He did, however, point out that he had produced an alternative set of figures for the Nordic countries, which the newspaper chose not to use, in which Sweden had exactly the same excess mortality as Denmark and Norway.

“I think they also could have published the computation I did for the Nordic countries of what was expected from the population predictions,” he said of the way SvD had used his numbers. “It takes into consideration trends in mortality by age and sex. The excess deaths were more similar for Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Almost the same.”

Here are Hemström’s alternative numbers:

Another issue with the analysis is that the SvD graph compares deaths in the pandemic years to deaths over just three years, a mean of 2017-2019, and does not properly take into account Sweden’s longstanding declining mortality trend, or the gently rising mortality trend in some other countries where mortality is creeping upwards due to an ageing population, such as Finland.

“It’s very difficult to compare countries and the longer the pandemic goes on for the harder it is, because you need a proper baseline, and that baseline depends on what happened before,” Karin Modig, an epidemiologist at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute whose research focuses on ageing populations, told The Local.

“As soon as you compare between countries, it’s more difficult because countries have different trends of mortality, they have different age structures, and in the pandemic they might have had different seasonal variations.”

She described analyses such as Hemström’s as “quite crude”.

In an interview with SvD to accompany the graph, Tegnell also pushed back against giving the numbers too much weight.

“Mortality doesn’t tell the whole story about what effect a pandemic has had on different countries,” he said. “The excess mortality measure has its weaknesses and depends a lot on the demographic structures of countries, but anyway, when it comes to that measure, it looks like Sweden managed to do quite well.”

Do the numbers match those provided by other international experts and media?

Sweden’s excess mortality over the three years of the pandemic is certainly below average worldwide, but it is only in the SvD/SCB figures that it beats Norway and Denmark.

A ranking of excess mortality put together by Our World in Data for the same period as the SvD/SCB table estimates Sweden’s excess mortality between the start of 2020 and the end of 2022 at 5.62 percent, considerably more than the 4.4 percent SvD claims and above that of Norway on 5.08 percent and Denmark on 2.52 percent.

The Economist newspaper also put together an estimate, using their own method based on projected deaths.

Our World in Data uses the estimate produced by Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak, who manage the World Mortality Dataset (WMD). To produce the estimate, they fit a regression model for each region using historical deaths data from 2015–2019, so a time period of five years rather than the three used by SCB.

What’s clear, is that, whatever method you use, Sweden is, along with the other Nordic countries, among the countries with the lowest excess mortality over the pandemic.

“Most methods seem to put Sweden and the other Nordic countries among the countries in Europe with the lowest cumulative excess deaths for 2020-2022,” said Preben Aavitsland, the Director for Surveillance and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

So if Sweden had similar excess mortality as the other Nordics over the period, does that mean it had a similar Covid-19 death rate?

Not at all. Sweden’s per capita death rate from Covid-19 over the period covered by the SvD/SCB figures, at 2,249 per million people, is more than double Norway’s 959 per million, 60 percent more than the 1,409 per million who died in Denmark, and more than 50 percent more than the 1,612 per million who died in Finland.

While Sweden’s death rate is still far ahead of those of its Nordic neighbours, it is now much closer to theirs than it was at the end of 2020.

“The most striking difference between Sweden and the other Nordic countries is that only Sweden had large excess mortality in 2020 and the winter of 2020-21,” Aavitsland explained. “In 2022, the field levelled out as the other countries also had excess mortality when most of the population was infected by the omicron variant after all measures had been lifted.”

So why, if the Covid-19 death rates are still so different, are the excess mortality rates so similar?

This largely reflects the fact that many of those who died in Sweden in the first year of the pandemic were elderly people in care homes who would have died anyway by the end of 2022.

About 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths were in people above 70, Aavitsland pointed out, adding that this is the same age group where you find around 80 percent of all deaths, regardless of cause, in a Scandinavian country.

“My interpretation is that in the first year of the pandemic, say March 2020 – February 2021, Sweden had several thousand excess deaths among the elderly, including nursing home residents,” he said. “Most of this was caused by Covid-19. In the other [Nordic] countries, more people like these survived, but they died in 2022. The other countries managed to delay some deaths, but now, three years after, we end up at around the same place.”

So does that mean Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was right all along?

It depends on how you view the shortened lives of the close to ten thousand elderly people who caught Covid-19 and died in Sweden in the first wave because Sweden did not follow the example of Denmark, Norway, and Finland and bring in a short three-week lockdown in March and April 2020.

Tegnell himself probably said it best in the SvD interview.

“You’ve got to remember that a lot of people died in the pandemic, which is of course terrible in many ways, not least for their many loved ones who were affected, so you need to be a bit humble when presented with these kinds of figures.”

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