[ad_1]
DOVER, England (Reuters) – More countries closed their borders with Britain on Monday over fears of a highly infectious new strain of coronavirus, intensifying global panic, causing travel chaos and increasing the prospect of food shortages in the UK just days before the brink of Brexit.
India, Poland, Switzerland, Russia, and Hong Kong suspended British travel after Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned that a mutated variant of the virus up to 70 percent more infectious had been identified in the country, while Japan and Korea Sur said they were monitoring the situation. situation.
Several countries have already suspended travel, including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Belgium, Israel and Canada.
The discovery of the new strain, just months before vaccines are expected to become widely available, sowed a new panic in a pandemic that has killed around 1.7 million people worldwide and more than 67,000. in Great Britain.
Australia said two people who traveled from the UK to the state of New South Wales were found to carry the mutated virus.
Johnson will chair an emergency response meeting Monday to discuss international travel, particularly the flow of cargo in and out of Britain. EU officials held a meeting to coordinate their response.
France closed its border to the arrivals of people and trucks from Great Britain, closing one of the most important commercial arteries with continental Europe.
As families and truck drivers tried to circumvent travel bans to return home in time for Christmas, Britain’s second-largest supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s, said gaps would start to appear on shelves within days if transport links were not quickly reestablished with continental Europe.
“If nothing changes, we will start to see gaps in the coming days in lettuce, some salad greens, cauliflower, broccoli and citrus, all of which are imported from the mainland at this time of year,” Sainsbury’s said.
Scottish seafood producers said they had tons of perishable goods stranded on the roads due to the closure of the French border. The disruption in Britain will also ruin supplies to Ireland.
“No driver wants to deliver to the UK right now, so the UK will see its freight supply deplete,” said France’s national federation for road transport FNTR.
The global alarm was reflected in the financial markets.
European stocks tumbled, with travel and leisure stocks hit the hardest; British Airways owner IAG and easyJet fell around 8%, while Air France KLM lost around 7%.
The British pound fell 2.5% against the dollar and was on track for its biggest one-day drop since March, while the yield on two-year British government bonds hit a record low.
British tabloids lamented the crisis.
“The sick man of Europe,” read the Daily Mirror newspaper on its front page alongside a photo of Johnson, while the Sun newspaper said “The French show no merci.”
NEW MUTATION
Johnson canceled Christmas plans for millions of Britons on Saturday due to the most infectious strain of the coronavirus, though he said there was no evidence that it was more deadly or caused a more serious illness.
The new variant contains 23 different changes, many of them associated with the way it attaches to and enters cells. British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said Britain had done some of the best global testing of virus mutations, so he was simply looking at what was already in other countries.
Shapps said his priority was to lift the bans as quickly as possible, but that given Britain’s preparations for the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31, the country was well-positioned for disruption.
The British government activated plans it had to stack trucks in the southeast county of Kent as part of its plans for a possible disruption when the UK exits the EU orbit with, or without, a trade agreement to 2300 GMT on December 31.
Talks on a Brexit trade deal were to continue on Monday.
“This is a serious situation as the goods in storage expected here are for Christmas and to help stabilize January,” Jon Swallow, head of British logistics group Jordon Freight, told Reuters.
“This shows how fragile the route between canals is.”
ASIAN INFECTIONS
The new strain of the virus has been identified in Britain at a time when COVID-19 cases have risen in several Asian countries that had previously successfully contained the pandemic. The spikes have led to localized lockdowns in some countries and more aggressive testing.
South Korea, which imposes a 14-day quarantine on everyone entering the country, said it was reviewing new measures for flights from Britain and would test twice as many as those arriving from there before they come out of quarantine.
New cases rose to more than 1,000 a day in South Korea several times last week. On Sunday he reported an outbreak in a Seoul prison where 188 inmates and staff were infected.
Thailand said on Sunday it was screening tens of thousands of people and extending restrictions on movement, after its worst outbreak yet that began at a market in a province that is a center of the fishing industry and home to thousands of migrant workers. .
Australia, where cases in Sydney have flared in recent days, canceled dozens of domestic flights on Monday. New South Wales, which has reported 86 new local cases since Thursday, ordered the closure of more than 250,000 people, although authorities emphasized that the infections were not the UK strain.
(Additional reporting from Toby Melville and James Davey in London, Laurence Frost in Paris; Sayantani Ghosh in Singapore, Josh Smith and Sangmi Cha in Seoul, Renju Jose in Sydney, Shilpa Jamkhandikar in Mumbai and Farah Master in Hong Kong; written by Guy Faulconbridge and Pravin Char; Edited by Alison Williams)
[ad_2]
