New super-variant puts African countries on red list
SOUTH AFRICA is being put on the travel red list from noon today amid widespread concern over a new Covid variant which has been detected in the country.
Neighbouring countries Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Eswatini (Swaziland) and Lesotho will also be red-listed with flights temporarily banned.
The red list had been scrapped earlier this month but the move marks a return to travel restrictions, with anyone travelling to the newly red-listed nations forced to spend 10 days in hotel quarantine on return, with a £10,000 penalty for those who flout the rules. Meanwhile, people who have recently arrived from South Africa will soon be offered a free Covid test in an attempt to detect any imported cases.
There are between 500 and 700 people a day coming into the UK from South Africa.
Announcing the new travel restrictions last night Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, confirmed the UK Health and Security Agency had launched an investigation into the new strain.
Mr Javid said the new variant “may be more transmissible” than the Delta strain and added “the vaccines that we currently have may be less effective”. Asked what the new variant means for Britain in the run-up to Christmas, he said: “We’ve got plans in place, as people know, for the spread of this infection here in the UK and we have contingency plans – the so-called Plan B.”
No cases of the variant have been detected in the UK and officials believe there is a low likelihood of the strain having entered Britain as the prevalence of infection – less than 1 per cent a week ago – in South Africa is relatively low.
Health officials in the UK believe the new variant, called B.1.1.529, is the worst yet to emerge. Its catalogue of 32 mutations have made the virus “dramatically different” to anything seen before, according to experts. The mutations occur throughout the virus, including on the spike protein that allows the coronavirus to enter human cells, leaving leading molecular biologists and virologists in the UK extremely concerned.
Experts fear the new variant has the potential to be more infectious than delta, the current strain, and better at dodging antibodies than the beta variant.
Beta first emerged in late 2020 in South Africa and is the strain most capable of evading the vaccine.
The World Health Organisation is meeting South African officials tomorrow to discuss the evolving situation in the country. The strain, once officially recognised by the WHO, is likely to receive the title nu, the 13th letter of the Greek alphabet. It has been found in 77 cases in South Africa, four in Botswana, and one in Hong Kong, in a patient who had recently visited South Africa.
Dr Emma Hodcroft, of the University of Bern in Switzerland, said: “We cannot perfectly predict virus behaviour from mutations. We need more data.”
Prof Danny Altmann, of Imperial College London, told The Daily Telegraph: “We have all become pandemic fatigued, yet if this was a report of a terrorist threat we would now be raising the threat level from amber to red.”