A growing number of European Union countries, Canada and others banned from traveling the UK on Sunday, and others are considering similar measures to prevent a new strain of the coronavirus from spreading across southern England. France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Norway, Bulgaria, Canada, Israel and Hong Kong all announced restrictions on travel in the UK after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Christmas shopping and gatherings in the South -England should be canceled due to rapidly spreading infections attributed to the new coronavirus variant.
Johnson immediately placed those regions under a strict new Tier 4 restriction level, shaking up Christmas plans for millions.
France banned all travel from the UK for 48 hours from midnight on Sunday, including trucks carrying cargo through the tunnel under the English Channel or from the port of Dover on England’s south coast. French officials said the break would take time to find a “common doctrine” on how to deal with the threat, but it brought chaos to the busy cross-channel route used by thousands of trucks every day.
The port of Dover tweeted Sunday evening that the ferry terminal was “closed until further notice to all accompanying traffic leaving the UK due to border restrictions in France”.
Eurostar passenger trains from London to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam were also shut down.
Germany said all flights coming from Britain, except cargo flights, were banned from landing from midnight on Sunday. It didn’t immediately say how long the flight ban would last.
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Denmark has suspended flights from Great Britain to Denmark for 48 hours from Monday, according to Reuters news service.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said he issued a flight ban for 24 hours from midnight “as a precaution”. He said there are “a lot of questions about this new mutation,” adding that he hoped to have more clarity on Tuesday.
Canada announced its own ban on Sunday evening. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement that for 72 hours starting at midnight on Sunday, “all flights from the UK should not enter Canada”. He added that travelers arriving on Sunday would be subject to secondary screening and other health measures. A follow-up statement from the government said that cargo flights were not covered by the ban.
Hong Kong banned flights from Britain due to the new virus strain, Agence France-Presse reported.
The Central American nation of El Salvador, meanwhile, said it would deny entry to anyone who has visited Britain in the past 30 days.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants a ban on flights from Britain to New York City for fear of the new form of the coronavirus.
Cuomo told reporters in a conference call Sunday that the six flights arriving daily from Britain at Kennedy Airport pose a health risk. He called on the federal government to ban the flights or to have all passengers tested.
The first wave of coronavirus infections in New York “came from Europe and we have done nothing,” said the Democratic governor. “To do nothing is negligent.”
President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general said on Sunday that the emergence of the new species does not change public health guidelines on precautions to reduce the spread of the virus, such as wearing masks, social distancing, and hands. Wash.
“While it appears to be more easily transmissible, we have no evidence yet that this is a deadlier virus to anyone who acquires it,” Vivek Murthy told NBC News “Meet the Press.” “There is no reason to believe that the vaccines that have been developed will not be effective against this virus either.”
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The UK government said Johnson would chair a meeting of the government’s crisis committee, COBRA, on Monday in the wake of the other countries’ measures. They come at a time of immense economic uncertainty for the UK, less than two weeks before it leaves the EU’s economic structures on December 31, and with talks of a new post-Brexit trade relationship still stalling.
Johnson said Saturday that a fast-moving new variant of the virus, which is 70% more transmissible than existing strains, appeared to be causing the rapid spread of new infections in London and southern England in recent weeks. But he stressed “there is no evidence to suggest that it is more deadly or causes more serious disease,” or that vaccines will be less effective against it.
Nonetheless, experts said it’s inevitable that more cases will lead to more hospitalizations and subsequent virus-related deaths.
On Sunday, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock added to the alarm when he said that “the new variant is getting out of hand”. The UK registered a further 35,928 confirmed cases, roughly double the number of a week ago.
Italy has discovered a patient infected with the new virus strain, the health ministry said Sunday night, according to The Telegraph. The patient and his partner had flown back to Italy from the UK in recent days, the ministry said.
Germany, which holds the rotating EU presidency, convened the special crisis meeting on Monday to coordinate the response to the virus news among the 27 member states of the bloc.
In any case, the Netherlands has banned flights from the UK for the rest of the year. Ireland has issued a 48-hour flight ban. Italy said it would block flights from the UK until January 6, and an injunction signed Sunday prohibits entry to Italy by anyone who has been in the UK in the past 14 days.
The Czech Republic has imposed stricter quarantine measures on people who came from Great Britain.
Outside of Europe, Israel also said it banned flights from Great Britain, Denmark and South Africa because those were the countries where the mutation is found.
The World Health Organization tweeted Saturday night that it was “in close contact with UK officials about the new # COVID19 virus variant” and pledged to keep governments and the public informed as more learns.
The new species was identified in southeast England in September and has been spreading in the area ever since, a WHO official told the BBC on Sunday. “What we understand is that it has increased transmissibility, in terms of its dispersibility,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical leader on COVID-19.
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Studies are underway to better understand how quickly it spreads and whether “it is related to the variant itself, or a combination of factors with behavior,” she added.
She said the species had also been identified in Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia, where there was one case that did not spread further.
“The longer this virus spreads, the more chances it has to change,” she said. “So we really have to do everything we can to prevent it spreading.”
Viruses regularly mutate, and scientists have found thousands of different mutations in samples of the virus that causes COVID-19. Many of these changes have no effect on how easily the virus spreads or how severe the symptoms are.
British health authorities said that although the variant has been in circulation since September, it was only last week that officials found they had enough evidence to state that it has higher transmissibility than other circulating coronaviruses.
Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, said officials are concerned about the new variant because it contains 23 different changes, “an unusually large number of variants” that affect how the virus binds to and affects the virus. invades cells in the body.
Officials aren’t sure if it’s from the UK, Vallance added. But by December, he said, it caused more than 60% of infections in London.
Europe has been trapped by new infections and deaths from a resurgence of the virus this fall, and many countries have again imposed a series of restrictions to try to contain their outbreaks.
Britain has seen more than 67,000 deaths in the pandemic, the second highest confirmed toll in Europe, after Italy. Europe as a whole has recorded nearly 499,000 virus deaths, according to a Johns Hopkins University census that experts say is under-graded due to limited testing and missed cases.
Meanwhile, the European Medicines Agency will meet on Monday to approve the first COVID-19 vaccine for the 27 countries of the European Union, bringing vaccinations closer to millions of EU citizens. The vaccine made by the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech and The American drug manufacturer Pfizer is already in use in the United States, Great Britain, Canada and other countries.
The EMA has increased its rating of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by a week after heavy pressure from EU governments, notably Germany, which has said it could start vaccinating citizens next Sunday following EMA approval.