When the UK Prime Minister spoke to the country on 20 December, the news was bad enough: Christmas was postponed.
Boris Johnson shook the country to very new restrictions, blaming a new version of the disease that had been spreading in London and the south-east of England since September.
But all of a sudden, things got worse. Country after country has closed its borders to flights from the UK, in an effort to keep the new variable limited to “the island of the plague,” as the New york times he named it.
With ferry routes across the Channel closed, lorries transporting goods to the mainland turned their backs on miles on the motorways. In turn, a local airport in Kent was turned into a car park for 4,000 lorries. Nothing could get into the UK, either. It was, the wags said, a taste of what Brexit would be like without a contract.
That treaty was not suspended – the government signed an agreement with the EU on December 24. But the crisis is far from over.
UK travelers are still banned from much of the world – including EU countries – because of the domestic difference.
And while the UK was the first country in the world to start vaccine distribution, the good news was slammed by the January 13 report that the death toll from Covid-19 had surpassed 100,000. Two days later, the government announced that they were removing their “last travel corridors.”
Traveling into the UK is a lucrative business – pre-Covid, Visit Britain predicts that 2020 would see 32.3 million visitors pumping £ 24.7 billion ($ 33.6 billion) into the economy.
Ultimately, 2020 saw a 76% drop in visitors and an 80% drop. The tourism board expects 16.9 million visits and £ 9 billion ($ 12.2 billion) for 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 a “plague island”?
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