U.K. shuts borders to block new variants
LONDON • Britain’s borders
will effectively be closed from Monday as fears grow about new variants of cor
onavirus, Boris Johnson has
announced.
The prime minister has scrapped all travel corridors, meaning that everyone arriving in the country from next week will need a negative COVID test and will then have to quarantine for 10 days.
The restrictions will last until at least Feb. 15, but with other countries behind
Britain in vaccinations,
there are already signs that travel will not return to normal until well beyond that date.
On Friday, scientific advisers also played down expectations of a return to normality by Easter, as Johnson said there was a danger of the virus “running riot” among young people if restrictions were lifted before they were vaccinated.
With 3.3 million people now inoculated — almost one in 20 of the population — the government is on course to hit its target of vaccinating 15 million elderly and vulnerable people in the U.K. by the middle of next month.
But while there was good
news on the rollout of the vaccine, government experts expressed deep concerns about new variants of the
virus emerging in Brazil,
which could possibly “get around” the vaccine and “bypass” the immunity built up by those who have had coronavirus.
In response to the dis
covery of the new “Brazilian
variant,” the U.K. has moved to ban all flights coming from South America for the foreseeable future.
Prof. Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, said that while the vaccination program in the U.K. was going well, the emergence of new variant was “an international problem” meaning that “a problem anywhere is a problem everywhere.”
Scientists believe the peak of infections in the current wave has now passed, and figures released Friday showed that the reproduction rate, or R number, has come down slightly to between 1.2 and 1.3, compared with last week's high of 1.4.
Hospital admissions are also reaching what is expected to be their peak, as there is a lag between people becoming infected and needing hospital treatment, while deaths are likely to remain high for some time for a similar reason. Tuesday's figure of 4,134 new hospital admissions was the highest at any point in the pandemic.
Hundreds of Army medics are to be sent into hospitals in London to help shore up understaffed intensive care units next week, according to a leaked email seen by The Independent. Soldiers will be drafted in to help support clinical workers on wards and take on duties such as moving patients and equipment around hospitals.
Announcing the new travel ban at a press conference, Johnson said: “It is precisely because we have the hope of (the) vaccine and the risk of new strains coming from overseas that we must take additional steps now to stop those strains from entering the country.”
From 4 a.m. on Monday, all arrivals from any country, including British nationals, must have proof of a negative COVID test within 72 hours of departure and must fill in a locator form giving the address where they will quarantine for 10 days. After five days, passengers can take another test and, if it proves negative, be released from quarantine.
Arriving in Britain without a negative test or locator form will incur a fine. The prime minister said enforcement would be toughened.
Truckers will be exempt from quarantine so that goods can continue to flow across the Channel. Johnson and his advisers also struck a note of pessimism about lifting domestic restrictions.
Johnson said that with 55,761 new positive cases and another 1,280 deaths reported Friday, “this is not the time for the slightest relaxation of our national resolve and our individual efforts.”
He said it would be “fatal” if the progress of the vaccination plan “were now to breed any kind of complacency because the pressures on our NHS are extraordinary.”
The prime minister said there was “a debate to be had” about when it would be safe to relax the current rules and how many people would need to have been vaccinated before that could happen.
He said that when the first round of vaccinations was complete in mid-february, “we will think about what steps we could take to lift the restrictions,” but warned that “it will also depend on where the disease is” and “there's a lot of things that have to go right.”
“We can't have any false sense of security, so that we lift the restrictions altogether, and then the disease really runs riot in the younger generations.”
Whitty said: “We're not going to move from a sudden lockdown situation to nothing, it will have to be walking backwards by degrees, testing what works.”