When the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom addressed the nation on December 20, the news was bad enough: Christmas was canceled.
Boris Johnson plunged the country into harsh new restrictions, blaming a new variant of the disease that had spread to London and the south-east of England since September.
But suddenly things got even worse. Country after country closed its borders to flights from the United Kingdom, in an attempt to keep the new variant confined to “Plague Island”, as New York News he baptized him.
With the ferry routes across the Canal blocked, trucks carrying goods to the mainland traveled miles down the highways. Eventually, a local Kent airport became a parking lot for 4,000 trucks. Nor could anything enter the UK. He was, the wags said, a taster of what would be a Brexit without an agreement.
This non-agreement was avoided: the government signed an agreement with the EU on December 24, but the crisis is far from over.
Travelers from the UK remain banned in much of the world, including EU countries, due to its own variant.
And while the UK was the first country in the world to start a vaccine deployment, its good news was affected by the January 13 report that Covid-19’s death toll had exceeded 100,000. . Two days later, the government announced it would be destroying its last “travel corridors.”
Inbound travel is a lucrative business for the UK, ahead of Covid’s Visit Britain forecast that by 2020 it would see 32.3 million visitors pumping £ 24.7 billion ($ 33.6 billion) into the economy .
In the end, 2020 saw a 76% drop in visitors and an 80% drop. The tourism council expects 16.9 million visits and £ 9bn ($ 12.2 billion) by 2021 – just 41% and 32% of 2019 figures respectively. But that is, of course, if people come. After all, who would want to vacation on “Pest Island”?
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