RACE TO TRACE BRAZILIAN MUTANT CARRIER
BORIS JOHNSON has insisted the UK has ‘one of the toughest border regimes anywhere in the world’ despite the arrival of the new Manaus coronavirus variant from Brazil.
The prime minister claimed the government ‘moved as fast as it could’ to introduce its quarantine hotel policy last month.
Health authorities have identified six UK cases of the Manaus variant – three in England and three in Scotland.
Last night they were still trying to track down one missing patient who took a test on February 12 or 13 but failed to fill in their contact details.
Dr Susan Hopkins of Public Health England (PHE) said fewer than one contact tracing form in every thousand is filled in incorrectly.
‘The current vaccines have not yet been studied against this variant and we will need to await further clinical and trial data to understand the vaccine effectiveness,’ she added.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the discovery of the variant in the UK showed the government had not ‘secured our borders [as] we should have done’.
He added: ‘It demonstrates the slowness of the government to close off even the major routes, but also the unwillingness to confront the fact that the virus doesn’t travel by direct flights.’
Welsh first minister Mark Drakeford has said he would take the ‘opposite’ approach to that of Westminster, which has imposed enhanced restrictions on people arriving from ‘red list’ countries.
He said: ‘I would say we shouldn’t be having international travel but here is a list of countries where we are confident that things are under control, where there are testing regimes, where we will be confident that people returning from there would not be posing a threat to us.’
But Mr Johnson said the ten-day quarantine period, which came into force on February 15, is a ‘very tough regime’.
He told reporters: ‘You have to test on day two and on day eight, and it’s designed to stop the spread of new variants while we continue to roll out the vaccination programme.’
It came as the daily death toll fell to 104, its lowest figure since October 26, while PHE revealed data showing a single dose of either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccine is cutting hospitalisations by 80 per cent in the over-70s.
Health secretary Matt Hancock called the figures ‘spectacular’ and left the country ‘one step closer to safety’.
‘The death rate is falling much, much faster than after the first peak and falling faster in the older people who have had the jab,’ he told the Downing Street press briefing.