Chances of The Philippines being moved off the red list before the end of the year?

Short and depressing answer, I think it could be the end of 2022 before we see a change.

Longer depressing answer and rant:-

Since August 12th they upped the charge to single travellers to £2,285 for a 10 day quarantine hotel Booking and staying in a quarantine hotel if you’ve been in a red list country - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The Philippines had its own variant of interest the Theta variant and when the UK got all pious about locking the borders after a year of having them wide open this was used as an excuse to to shove the country with the hardest longest lockdown in the world into the UK red list.

The Theta variant is no longer considered a variant of interest by the WHO as of July 21st 2021 SARS-CoV-2 Theta variant - Wikipedia

Delta is now in the Philippines and will soon sweep through the country causing devastation and will dominate over all other variants it only takes a couple of months for it to reach that dominance as can be quite obviously seen in now the UK, we have Delta everywhere when it almost didn't exist in the UK in April, but while Johnson procrastinated over his visit to India, basically a political grandstanding post Brexit whoop de doo look at my deal with India tour for which the British people paid the price of having a post lockdown case levels of about 50,000 cases per day (COVID ZOE STUDY estimates not official published Gov numbers).

Johnson procrastinated and we ended up with a worse case load post lockdown than we had to have, overall UK infection rates today would have been much lower if India had gone on the red list at the same time as the Philippines indeed they should have introduced this rule earlier when the list system first came into being and we would be facing a much lower case load now with higher vaccination numbers keeping a lid on transmissions.

Once delta has swept through the Philippines the red list quarantine requirement will be manifestly unfair, it already is unfair as travellers to the Philippines would be under quarantine with their own families in their own homes during their visit there anyway and any exposure to infection will likely be at and in the airport or getting to and from the airport.

I mistakenly said back in Feb or March 2020 that soon travel restrictions would not matter because COVID would shortly be everywhere, while I was right about the spread, I had not quite considered the true scale, had we not locked down the infection rate would have so high that people would have been dying at home in massive numbers because the hospitals would have been totally overwhelmed, it got close in the UK and it is indeed still damned close to that situation in the UK even with the vaccines.

Keeping the list and quarantine system is one very clear reminder that life is not back to normal not even close, the real risk posed by returning travellers from the Philippines at this point in time is no greater than anyone returning from Europe, the risk of importing a new variant is no greater than that from any other country, case numbers while growing in the Philippines are still low, by Christmas it could be a lot worse but unless an even more infectious variant appears it's going to be Delta that any traveller could bring back and the few travellers we have to the Philippines will be no greater a risk on return than the current local delta transmissions in the UK, so it is unfair.

For me I could not afford £1,750 on return, I could probably afford the Philippine hotel quarantine lets say 3000 peso a night to err on the expensive side, about £450, but 10 days is a lot when your entire break is only 30 odd days, I could probably work from quarantine at home on return but to work from a quarantine hotel is another matter altogether.

I say I could not afford the £1750, I could actually even the new £2,285 figure I could afford, it would use up almost all of my Christmas bonus, if I get one this year we didn't last year, but I physically could afford it but I shouldn't have to.

I should be allowed to self quarantine at home on return from a red list country, I still have to pass through an airport, I will have been in plane with many others who I could infect if I have an infection or who could infect me, I am double vaccinated like all those who will be returning from amber countries, so to me the rules make no public health sense now, if we really cared about importing cases we should still all be banned from all travel.

So right now I think it will be a long long time before we get back to the Philippines.

edit: I've warned my kids that Christmas is just a hope at the moment but they are going to be really disappointed if I can't make it.

Well he'll be gone soon unless he stages a coup, hopefully they get someone better.

The simple lockdown tactic has worked, I will grant him that and from a public health standpoint they have done quite well in preventing it ravaging the country so far, but economically it has been crippling.

Lambda is in the US already and in lots of other countries including the UK unless it can beat Delta at replication it will die out.

There are credible people in the UK talking about Ivermectin but I think it is still stretching things to claim it as a cheap cure, they need randomised control tests and these have not been done it's still mostly anecdotal results from people that have just gone ahead and tried it with their patients, it has some anti viral properties.

Yeah I agree with your assessment, there are two sides to this our assessment of their vaccine program with respect to 'red' status and their willingness to trust aging vaccination status of foreign tourists against their own vaccination program.

The anti-vaxers worldwide are putting everyone in jeopardy

If you are vaccinating millions of people around the world some of the people will get sick and die, because there are always people getting sick and dying and sometimes they co-incidentally happen to die round about the time that they get the vaccine.

My eldest daughter was talking to me a few months back about her aunt Karen (an aptly named woman) who had reported that her mother had died earlier this year a day or two after getting the AZ vaccine, this was in Scotland and the mother would have been elderly.

Leaving aside that these reports are very often third or fourth hand and dubious to start with, there are going to be plenty of people who are already sick with Covid who go for vaccination get vaccinated and subsequently die from Covid, there were several reports of this in the UK last year where young people who did not look terribly ill or thought they just had a cold dropped dead suddenly, Covid has been and still is killing people through kidney failure, liver failure and thrombosis due to blood coagulation brought on by the virus, these people can very suddenly die.

Where this happens this will feed the gossip and alarmism surrounding vaccination, the numbers of people dying in this way is likely higher than the numbers who are dying through real reactions to their vaccinations.

At the end of the day the you have two choose between two games of Russian roulette, where one of the guns is loaded with a lot more bullets, Covid has a very high chance of death in the vast majority of cases compared to the risk of bad reactions to the vaccine.

It's hard and one can understand the fear but these kind of stories are doing no one in the Philippines any favours, if I could I would be getting my kids over there vaccinated.