An increasing number of European Union countries, Canada and others banned travel from the UK on Sunday, and others have considered similar actions in an attempt to block the spread of a new strain of coronavirus through the south of England. France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Norway, Bulgaria, Canada, Israel and Hong Kong have announced restrictions on travel to the UK after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Christmas shopping and gatherings in the south of England must be canceled due to the rapid spread of infections attributed to the new variant of coronavirus.
Johnson immediately placed those regions under a new strict Level 4 restriction, raising Christmas plans for millions.
France has banned all travel in the UK for 48 hours from midnight on Sunday, including trucks carrying goods through the Channel Tunnel or the port of Dover on the south coast of England. French officials said the break would save time to find a “common doctrine” on how to deal with the threat, but threw into chaos the multi-channel busy route used by thousands of trucks every day.
The port of Dover wrote on Twitter on Sunday night that its ferry terminal had been “closed to all traffic accompanied by the exit from the UK until a new notification due to border restrictions in France”.
Eurostar passenger trains from London to Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam were also stopped.
Germany said all flights coming from the UK, except for cargo flights, were not allowed to land from midnight on Sunday. He did not immediately say how long the flight ban would last.
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Denmark has suspended flights from the UK to Denmark for 48 hours since Monday, according to Reuters.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo has said he will issue a 24-hour flight ban starting at midnight “as a precaution”. He said there were “many questions about this new mutation”, adding that he hoped to have more clarity by Tuesday.
Canada announced its own ban on Sunday night. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement that for 72 hours from midnight on Sunday, “all flights in the UK will be barred from entering Canada”. He added that passengers who arrived on Sunday will be subjected to secondary screening and other health measures. A government follow-up statement said that cargo flights were not included in the ban.
Hong Kong has banned flights from the UK because of the new strain of virus, Agence France-Presse reported.
Meanwhile, the Central American nation of El Salvador has said it will refuse entry to anyone who has visited Britain in the past 30 days.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to ban flights from the UK to New York because of fears about the new strain of coronavirus.
Cuomo told reporters in a teleconference on Sunday that the six flights that arrive daily at Kennedy Airport in the United Kingdom pose a health risk. He called on the federal government to either ban flights or require all passengers to be tested.
The first wave of coronavirus infections in New York “came from Europe and we did nothing,” the Democratic governor said. “Doing nothing is careless.”
Presidential candidate Joe Biden for the US surgeon in the United States said on Sunday that the emergence of the new strain does not change the public health guide on precautions to reduce the spread of the virus, such as wearing masks, social distance and hand washing.
“Although it appears to be more easily transmitted, we do not yet have evidence that it is a more lethal virus for a person 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 as well.”
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The British government said Johnson would chair a meeting of the government’s crisis committee, COBRA, on Monday, following measures by other nations. They come at a time of huge economic uncertainty for the UK, less than two weeks before it leaves the EU’s economic structures on 31 December and with talks on a new post-Brexit trade relationship still stalled.
Johnson said on Saturday that a new rapid variant of the virus, which is 70% more transmissible than existing strains, appears to have led to the rapid spread of new infections in London and southern England in recent weeks. He stressed, however, that “there is no evidence to suggest that it is more lethal or causes more severe disease” or that vaccines will be less effective against it.
However, experts said, it is inevitable that more cases will lead to more hospitalizations and subsequent deaths related to the virus.
On Sunday, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock sounded the alarm when he said that “the new variant is out of control”. The UK recorded 35,928 confirmed cases, about double the number a week ago.
Italy has detected a patient infected with the new strain of the virus, the health ministry said on Sunday evening, according to The Telegraph. The patient and his partner have flown back to Italy from the UK in recent days, the ministry said.
Germany, which holds the rotating EU presidency, convened a special crisis meeting on Monday to coordinate the response to virus news between the bloc’s 27 member states.
The Netherlands has banned flights from the UK for at least the rest of the year. Ireland has issued a 48-hour flight ban. Italy has said it will block flights from the UK until January 6, and an order signed on Sunday bans anyone who has been in the UK in the past 14 days from entering Italy.
The Czech Republic has imposed stricter quarantine measures on people arriving from the UK.
Beyond Europe, Israel has also said it bans flights from Britain, Denmark and South Africa, as these were the countries where the mutation is found.
The World Health Organization wrote on Twitter late Saturday that it is “in close contact with British officials on the new variant of the # COVID19 virus” and promised to update governments and the public as more are available.
The new strain was identified in the south-east of England in September and has spread in the area since then, a WHO official told the BBC on Sunday. “What we understand is that it has an increased transmissibility in terms of its ability to spread,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical director for COVID-19.
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Studies are underway to better understand how fast it spreads and whether “it is related to the variant itself or a combination of behavioral factors,” she added.
She said the strain was also identified in Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia, where there was a case that did not spread further.
“The more this virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to change,” she said. “So we have to do everything we can right now to prevent the spread.”
Viruses move regularly, and scientists have discovered thousands of different mutations among virus samples that cause COVID-19. Many of these changes have no effect on how easily the virus spreads or how severe the symptoms are.
The British health authorities said that although the version has been circulating since September, only in the last week have officials felt that they have enough evidence to declare that it has a higher transmissibility than other circulating coronaviruses.
Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, said officials were concerned about the new variant, as it contained 23 different changes, “an unusually large number of variants” that affect how the virus binds and enters body cells.
Officials are not sure if they come from the UK, Vallance added. But by December, he said, it had caused more than 60 percent of infections in London.
Europe has been threatened this fall by rising new infections and deaths due to the recurrence of the virus, and many nations have reintroduced a series of restrictions to try to rule their homes.
The UK recorded more than 67,000 deaths from the pandemic, the second highest confirmed value in Europe after Italy. Europe as a whole recorded nearly 499,000 deaths from the virus, according to a report by Johns Hopkins University, which experts believe is insufficient due to limited tests and failed cases.
Meanwhile, the European Medicines Agency is meeting to approve the first COVID-19 vaccine for the 27 nations of the European Union, bringing vaccinations closer to millions of EU citizens. The vaccine produced by the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech and The American pharmacist Pfizer is already used in the United States, UK, Canada and other countries.
The EMA has advanced the assessment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine a week after strong pressure from EU governments, especially Germany, which said that after EMA approval, vaccination of citizens could begin as early as next Sunday.