London saw wild scenes of a mass exodus over the weekend before the start of a Christmas blockade and a travel ban caused by a new, more infectious mutation in COVID-19.
Within hours of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcement on Saturday of a new top-level blockade on the capital and surrounding areas – one of many detractors said he had “effectively canceled Christmas” – thousands took to the streets and clogged the stations.
Witnesses told The Sun that he left London as a “war zone”, while journalist Harriet Clugston compared her viral video to crowded people at St. John’s Station. Pancras in London with those fleeing Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
“The last train in Saigon,” Clugston wrote next to her video seen more than 3.1 million times by Sunday morning, calling it “maximum guaranteed damage.”
“As expected, the train is crowded … Everyone has suitcases, of course,” she said from the train where they were told that social distancing “will not be possible” due to the number of people on board.
She admitted that she – like everyone else on the train – “made what is probably a very stupid and irresponsible decision to travel”.
But the last-minute announcement of the blockade created “a very predictable footprint of people rushing out before the midnight deadline,” she wrote.
“It created a lot of people, which increases the risk of transmitting the virus on the train.
Britain’s Health Minister Matt Hancock on Sunday broke the “clear, totally irresponsible behavior” of the masses rushing to travel before closing at midnight.
“People should unpack if they packed it,” he told Sky News.
Hancock insisted that the government was forced to act “quickly and decisively” because the new coronavirus mutation “was out of control.”
The strain – which accounts for more than 60 percent of new infections in London – appears to be more communicable than previous variants, making it “more important now than ever” to control it, Hancock said.
“This is a deadly disease, we need to keep it under control and it has been hampered by this new variant,” he told Sky.