New strict requirements will arrive for travelers who want to enter Britain from Monday, worried about new mutations in the deadly coronavirus.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has imposed new rules that require everyone traveling to Britain to have a negative coronavirus test within the previous 72 hours and to be isolated immediately for up to ten days, he reported. The Times of London.
Government data show that the number of patients hospitalized with coronavirus in the UK increased by 35 per cent over the past week. The burden is greatly affecting health workers.
The restrictions have no end date, but the government said they will last at least a month. Since most holiday travel was already banned, the new rules are likely to affect business travel and British citizens returning from other countries.
The new rules begin days after the prime minister said the nation’s vaccination program would run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Johnson said that after progress with vaccinations, “what we don’t want to see is that all that has been undone with the arrival of a new variant that is eliminating the vaccine,” The Times reported.
The number of new coronavirus cases in the UK reached 55,885 on Saturday, according to Johns Hopkins University. This dropped from a record high of 68,192 on January 8th. The new deaths reached 1,285, also from the record 1,568 deaths reached on Wednesday.
The virus has killed nearly 87,500 people in the UK, including 76,338 in England.