Travelers walk the Thames Road overlooking Tower Bridge in London, UK, on Monday 14 December 2020.
Hollie Adams | Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Netherlands, Belgium and Austria on Sunday banned flights from the UK and Germany to consider limiting those flights to ensure a new coronavirus strain crossing the south of England does not establish a strong foothold. on the continent.
The Netherlands banned flights from the UK for at least the rest of the year, while Belgium issued a 24-hour flight ban from midnight and also stopped rail connections to Britain, including the Eurostar. . German officials were considering “serious options” regarding incoming flights from the UK, but have yet to take action.
Austria said it would also stop flights from the UK, but there were no immediate details about the timing of the ban, the Austrian news agency APA reported. Meanwhile, the Czech Republic imposed stricter quarantine measures on people arriving from the United Kingdom
The five EU governments say their response comes to the harshest measures imposed on Saturday in London and surrounding areas by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He immediately put these regions on a new level of level 4 restrictions, saying that a new variant of the virus that moves quickly and is 70% more transmissible than existing strains seems to be driving the rapid spread of new infections in London and in the south of England.
“There is no evidence to indicate that she is more lethal or causes more serious illness,” Johnson said, or that vaccines will be less effective against her.
Italy also plans to suspend flights to and from the UK over concerns over the new coronavirus strain, its foreign minister, Luigi di Maio, announced on Sunday afternoon, local time.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said Sunday he had banned flying for 24 hours from midnight “as a precaution”.
“There are a lot of questions about this new mutation and whether it is still on the mainland,” he said. I hoped to have more clarity on Tuesday.
The World Health Organization tweeted on Saturday afternoon that “we are in close contact with UK officials on the new variant of the # COVID19 virus”. He pledged to update governments and the public as more information on this variant is learned.
The new strain of coronavirus was identified in the south-east of England in September and has been circulating in the area since then, a WHO official told the BBC on Sunday.
“What we understand is that it has increased transmissibility, in terms of its dissemination capacity,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO Technical Officer on COVID-19.
He began studies to better understand how quickly it spreads and whether it “is related to the variant itself, or to a combination of factors and behavior,” he said.
He said the strain had also been identified in Denmark, the Netherlands and Australia, where there was a case that did not spread further.
“The longer this virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to change,” he said. “So we really have to do everything we can right now to prevent the spread, and minimizing that spread will reduce the chances of it changing.”
Susan Hopkins of Public Health England said that although the variant has been circulating since September, it was not until this week that officials felt they had enough evidence to declare it has a higher transmissibility than other circulating viruses.
The strain has spread to other parts of the UK, but in smaller amounts than in London and surrounding areas, it told the BBC.
Germany has not yet expressed a ban, but is also considering limiting or stopping flights from the UK, the dpa news agency reported on Sunday. A senior German official told dpa that restrictions on flights from Britain are a “serious option”.
The Czech Republic has announced that all people arriving in the country who have spent at least 24 hours in British territory in the last two weeks will have to isolate themselves from this Sunday.
Germany, which holds the rotating EU presidency of 27 countries, was in contact with its neighbors and was closely following all developments on the new variant, dpa reported.
Europe has been surrounded this fall by rising new infections and deaths due to the resurgence of the virus, and many nations have re-imposed a number of restrictions to reign in their outbreaks.
Britain has recorded more than 67,000 deaths in the pandemic, the second highest number confirmed in Europe after Italy.
Johnson closed all non-essential shops, hairdressers, gyms and swimming pools on Saturday and told the British to reorganize their holiday plans. It is now not allowed to mix households inside level 4 zones, including London, and only essential displacement in and out of these zones is allowed. In the rest of England, they will be allowed to gather in Christmas bubbles for just one day instead of the five that were planned.
—Reuters contributed to this report.