5 days to go until Europe reopens its external borders- but who will be allowed in?

With the borders set to open to non-European visitors in just 5 days, the EU has still not specified who will be allowed in and which countries might be banned due to their infection rate, as the 27 are still discussing the criteria for letting them in or not.

The ambassadors of the 27 EU member states will try again this Friday to reach an agreement on how to open the borders to non-European countries after intensive negotiations over the last few days.

Some provisional lists that have been published by The New York Times, appear to leave out some countries including the US, Russia, and Brazil due to their level of new infections. The United States has the most confirmed cases worldwide, over 2.3 million followed by Brazil, over 1.1 million, and lastly Russia with nearly 600,000 cases.

The Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya speaking to TVE said that “there are places in Latin America, in the United States, where the epidemic has not yet reached its peak” and therefore the EU wants to be “extremely careful with the arrival of citizens from these countries into the European space”.

However, the exclusion of these three countries has not been confirmed and González Laya insisted that the criteria will be based strictly on epidemiological data “because this is a pandemic, not a diplomatic discussion”, she said.