As nation after nation tore up this week to close its borders with Britain, the movements brought back memories of how the world reacted after the general outbreak of the coronavirus in the spring. Most of these travel bans came too late, enforced after the virus became widespread in communities.
This time, with countries trying to stop the spread of a new type of potentially more infectious coronavirus that Britain has announced, it may be too late. The extent of the spread is already unknown, experts say, and the ban threatens to cause economic and emotional hardship as the virus’ growth hole grows.
“It’s ungodly” was Dr Peter Kremsner, the director of Tübingen University Hospital in Germany ,’s grim assessment. “If this mutant was on the island alone, only then would it make sense to close the borders to England, Scotland and Wales. But if it has spread, we must fight the new mutant everywhere. ”
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He noted that the scientific understanding of the imitation was limited, with the dangers unclear, and noted naive that the variation was not already widespread outside Britain.
Also, Britain has some of the most exciting genomic analysis efforts in the world, which has allowed scientists there to find the variant when it may be unconscious elsewhere, experts said.
Dr Hans Kluge, the World Health Organisation’s regional director for Europe, said member states would try to take a sensible approach to any threat posed by the opposite. At this point, he wrote on Twitter, “it makes sense to restrict travel to maintain distribution so that we have better information.”
But he said, “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”
With growing calls for the United States to join dozens of countries banning travel from Britain, Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert, urged a warning, saying there was a good chance that the opposite already existed.
“I don’t think that kind of magical approach is needed,” he told PBS NewsHour on Monday night. “I think we should seriously consider the possibility of testing people before they come from the UK here.”
Gov. said. Andrew Cuomo of New York that British Airways, Delta Air Lines and Virgin Atlantic had agreed to request a negative coronavirus test result from passengers flying from Britain to New York. In the absence of federal action, other state and local leaders called for similar measures before the peak holiday travel days.
Many countries already require a negative coronavirus test for admission, but cutting off all travel between countries is a fuller recommendation.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has urged members of the bloc to ban British blankets until necessary travel takes place. But for now, it seems that countries would prefer to set their own rules. Late Tuesday, France rallied back on the brink of closure it announced Sunday it had seized more than 1,000 truck drivers. Now, he says, select groups of people can cross the border if they were recently tested for the virus.
The situation involves a travel industry already plagued by the pandemic, forcing millions to change their holiday plans and inject a new dose of anxiety at gloomy end of year.
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Meanwhile, another variant of the virus is causing concern while it is spreading in South Africa. At least five countries – Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and Turkey – have banned travelers coming from South Africa.
Sweden has suspended travel from Denmark following reports that the British counterpart has been found there. And Saudi Arabia went even further, suspending international air travel into the kingdom for at least a week.
The South African variant became the subject of an intensive scientific study after doctors there discovered that infected people carry a higher viral load – a higher concentration of the virus in the respiratory tract. high of them. In many viral diseases, this is associated with more severe symptoms.
Given the extent of the spread of the two variables, it is impossible to assess the impact of the efforts to separate Britain and South Africa from them.
With its solemn genomic analysis efforts, Britain has tracked about 150,000 coronavirus genomes in an effort to identify mutations. That’s about half of the world’s genomic data on the virus, said Sharon Peacock, director of the Coomid-19 Genomics UK Consortium and professor of microbiology at Cambridge University.
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“If you’re going to find something anywhere, chances are you’ll find it here first,” Peacock said. “If this happens in places that don’t have any series, you won’t get it at all,” she said, unless they have done other tests that have been helpful in identifying the opposite.
In Wales, a country of 3 million people, geneticists have tracked more coronavirus genomes in the past week than scientists have studied during the pandemic in France, a country of 67 million , said Thomas Connor, a professor who specializes in pathogen differentiation at Cardiff University.
“It seems that changes like this are happening all over the world,” he said. “And there are changes that are likely to occur elsewhere that are spreading locally and would be completely unnoticed because there is no series.”
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British officials have said the first case of the variant that is now spreading widely in the country was discovered in Kent, in the south-east of England, on 20 September. By November, around a quarter of cases in London – an international trade hub – involved a new variable. Just a few weeks later, the variance was estimated to be responsible for nearly two-thirds of cases in Greater London.
That means before Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced the country on Saturday night to announce new lockout measures for millions of people in and around London, the dilemma had been spreading for months.
Officials in France and Germany on Tuesday acknowledged that the variant may already be circulating in their countries. The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said a few cases with the new variant have been found in Denmark, Iceland, and the Netherlands. And health officials in Australia and Italy have reported cases in British travelers.
Supporters of the travel bans said they could play a part in keeping issues of new changes lower.
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“Numbers are important,” Emma Hodcroft, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, wrote on Twitter. “It seems that the number of people with the new variant on the continent of Europe is still small: with testing, detection, identification and limitation, we may be able to stop them from transmitting the virus. ”
If the variant proves to be much more contagious than others in circulation and becomes more widespread, it could exacerbate global vaccination efforts.
Dr. Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech, which developed, with Pfizer, the first vaccine approved in the West to fight the coronavirus, warned that it would be two weeks before full results from work-based studies would allow blade to gain a better understanding of how the mutations may alter the effectiveness of the vaccine.
“We think there’s no reason to worry until we get the data,” he said.
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If a modified vaccine was needed, it could be ready within six weeks, Sahin told a news conference Tuesday. But it needed more permission from regulators, which could increase the waiting time, he said.
He also said a more effective virus would make it harder to achieve the levels of immunity needed to end the pandemic.
“If the virus becomes more effective in infecting humans,” he said, “it may require an even higher level of immunization to ensure a normal unbroken life.”