The UK is set to end hotel quarantine for almost all countries, the Sunday Telegraph reported, citing sources who said the current “red list” of 54 countries will be slashed to as few as nine.

The changes, that are expected to be announced on Thursday, will allow travellers to visit those countries without having to self-isolate on their return. South Africa, Brazil and Mexico are expected to be opened up to quarantine-free travel in time for the October half-term break for schools.

Meanwhile, New Zealand placed its fourth-largest city into a snap lockdown after two cases of Covid-19 were reported outside Auckland, where an outbreak of the infectious Delta variant continues to spread.

Australia reported more than 1,900 new infections of the Delta variant on Sunday, health data showed, with cases spreading to new states. The island state of Tasmania, which has not had a case for 58 days, reported a new local infection late on Saturday, and there were new cases in South Australia state over the weekend.

Separately, Dubai’s Expo 2020 acknowledged for the first time on Sunday that three workers had died from the coronavirus over the course of building the fair during the pandemic.

‘US is turning the corner’

“We certainly are turning the corner on this particular surge,” US infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “The way to keep it down, to make that turnaround continue to go down, is to do what we mentioned: get vaccinated.”

The head of Germany’s BioNTech , which developed the first Covid-19 vaccine along with Pfizer said a new formula will probably be needed by mid-2022 to protect against future virus mutations, according to the Financial Times.