EDINBURG, Scotland: On January 2, Boris Johnson felt pretty good about himself. Just got a massive majority in last year’s festive election, the British Prime Minister has posted a photo with his thumbs up of his smiling face with the caption: “It will be a fantastic year for Britain”. By the end of 2020, with a mutant virus raging around his country, Christmas has been canceled by the millions, negotiations on Brexit are blocked and nations around the world are banning any kind of travel since Britain, it’s fair to say Johnson’s prediction was a bit broad. The mark.
Britain is in a state of unparalleled crisis. Johnson’s horrific weekend television speech, when he revealed that a new, apparently faster coronavirus strain that was being released in London, has had a domino effect around the world. More than 30 countries have closed their doors to new British travel; the worst thing is that France has closed the border with the United Kingdom for two days, which means that no commercial transport of goods can arrive from Europe, which makes one fear the immediate shortage of food days before Christmas.
On Monday morning, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Holland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, Belgium, Bulgaria, Turkey, Switzerland, Canada, Hong Kong, Israel, Iran, Croatia, Argentina, El Salvador, Chile, The Morocco, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have announced bans. No action has yet been taken in the United States, although New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has demanded new federal restrictions to prevent British flights from transmitting their airports to New York City.
But experts fear it may be too late to stop the mutant strain of COVID racing across the planet.
Many questions about the British variant of the virus remain unanswered. Since the pandemic occurred in March, the world has largely learned what to expect from the coronavirus, but now the rulebook is being frantically rewritten in Britain, where people are facing a mutated virus that appears to be much better for infecting people. There is no evidence to suggest that the mutation would make a COVID infection more deadly, but just increasing transmission would be enough to strain hospitals already cruising the country.
There is also no evidence to suggest that approved vaccines do not work against the mutation, but that does not mean that scientists are not concerned about that prospect. Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at Cambridge University, told BBC News: “If we let you add more mutations, then you start to worry … This virus is potentially on a path to escaping the vaccine. has taken the first couple of steps towards that. ” U.S. Army scientists are conducting their own tests to make sure the vaccine is still effective against the British strain.
This is not just a British problem, despite travel restrictions, experts have suggested that the British strain seems to be spreading so fast that it may become the dominant strain globally. Professor Calum Semple, who is part of the British government’s advisory group, said the strain “causes more disease more quickly” and will likely “surpass competition from other varieties” to become the most common in the world. world.
The effect of the mutation is already evident in Britain. New coronavirus cases in the UK rose by 35,928 on Sunday, almost double what was recorded seven days earlier. Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the nation on Sunday that the strain was “out of control.”
Johnson plans to chair an emergency response meeting Monday to discuss the unprecedented disaster in peacetime. It could not have come at a worse time: many British companies were already engaged in a storage brake before 31 December, when the withdrawal period of the Brexit transition with the European Union ends and the new customs rules come into force. It is still unclear what those rules will be, as British and European negotiators have not reached an agreement again over the weekend. Johnson said during the Brexit referendum that Britain would not leave without an agreement, but that promise seems set to collapse.
The disastrous moment has also torn apart millions of people. Johnson had insisted only last Wednesday that the five-day window scheduled for Christmas to be mixed in the UK would continue. That day, in the face of opposition calls to abandon plans, he ridiculed the idea and said he would not dream of canceling Christmas. Three days later, he told the people of London that they would not be allowed to visit friends and family. The rest of the country had the visiting window reduced only to Christmas Day, though the the government has urged the people do not use it.
Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer has accused Johnson of “grave negligence” over his prevarication, saying the need to restrict relaxation of rules over Christmas had been “blatantly evident” for weeks. Starmer repeated a criticism directed at Johnson throughout his career: that he stopped having to make an “unpopular” decision until it was too late. Videos of London train stations full on Saturday night, hours before new travel restrictions come in, suggest he is right.
It is obvious that this has not been a “fantastic year for Britain” and that the remaining ten days of 2020 are the worst of all.