Consultative Committee decides on temporary travel restrictions and extension of isolation requirements

Restriction on international travel

I.            Restriction on non-essential travel

Travel for recreational/tourism purposes to and from Belgium is prohibited from Wednesday, January 27 to Monday, March 1, 2021. The travel restrictions will be enforced for road, air, sea and rail traffic.

Anyone travelling to and from Belgium must have a solemn declaration. A model form will be made available by the Minister of Interior. The solemn declaration must be linked to the Passenger Location Form and corroborated by the necessary documents.

During the period of the restriction, only essential travel is allowed. Specifically, this includes travel for the following reasons:

1.           Compelling family reasons

• Family Reunification;
• Visits to a spouse or partner who does not live under the same roof, to the extent that plausible evidence of a stable and permanently maintained relationship can be provided;
• Travel related to co-parenting, civil and religious weddings, funerals or cremations (of relatives or next of kin).

2.           Humanitarian reasons

• Travel for medical reasons and continuation of medical treatment;
• Assistance to an elderly, minor, disabled or vulnerable person
• Visiting relatives in palliative care.

3.           Study reasons

• Travel of pupils, students and trainees who are on exchange as part of their studies;
• Researchers with a host agreement.

4.           Residents of border regions

• Travel as part of their daily lives, to carry out activities that are also allowed in Belgium;

5.           Professional reasons, to carry out your professional duties

6.           Miscellaneous

• Taking care of animals, travel related to meeting one's legal obligations (to the extent that this cannot be handled digitally), urgent repairs for reasons of vehicle safety, and relocations are also considered essential.

II.           Travelers from the United Kingdom, South Africa and South America

As of Monday, January 25, all travelers to Belgium from the United Kingdom, South Africa and South America will be required to spend 10 days in quarantine with a PCR test being performed on day 1 and day 7.

III.         Double test upon entry

The Consultative Committee would like every non-resident traveling to Belgium to be tested again upon arrival in Belgium, in addition to the mandatory negative test prior to departure. This test can be a PCR test or a rapid antigen test. The Consultative Committee asks the Interministerial Conference on Public Health, the Task Force on Testing and the COVID Commissariat to implement this in practice.

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Extended isolation

People who test positive for COVID-19 will now have to self-isolate for ten days.

After a high-risk contact or travel to our country, the duration of the quarantine remains ten days. This duration can be shortened to a minimum of seven days provided your test was negative no earlier than seven days after exposure.

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Perspective for non-medical contact professions

In the current state of the epidemic, a reopening of non-medical contact professions is not yet an option.

An opening is possible from February 13 at the earliest, provided that the epidemiological situation continues to evolve favorably.

The Consultative Committee will review this situation on February 5. 

Moreover, the non-medical contact professions will only be able to open if they strictly adhere to the existing protocols, supplemented by a series of additional measures, such as the obligation to make an appointment, mandatory registration, customers having to wait outside and windows and doors remaining open at all times.