From Tuesday, local police will be empowered by law to verify compliance with quarantines, but while information on patients and their close associates can be obtained from local investigators, the same is not true for people recently back from abroad.
Due to technical problems, the personal information of travellers returning to Belgium from abroad has not yet reached local authorities, Het Nieuwsblad and Gazet van Antwerpen reported on Saturday.
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People returning from a red zone must remain in quarantine for at least seven days. Ideally, compliance with this requirement can be verified since recent figures from the Inter-federal committee on testing and tracing show that 33,026 test codes were sent out during the last weekend of the Christmas holidays, when a novel coronavirus test became compulsory for travellers.
However, four out of every 10 travellers do not take the test and there is a strong chance that they also fail to self-quarantine, the two newspapers pointed out.
The Brussels Times
