By Alexander Smith - NBC News
LONDON - Britain is increasingly isolated on Monday, as countries around the world closed their doors to the island nation after a possibly more infectious strain of the coronavirus was detected.
Nearly two dozen countries, including Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Iran, Colombia and Morocco
have suspended flights from the UK
for 48 hours or more.
Saudi Arabia also closed its borders and suspended all flights, regardless of destination or origin.
Crisis meetings were scheduled in London and Brussels while officials grapple with how to respond to the variant, which experts say is 70% more transmissible than others in circulation.
A traveler passes an information board with a suitcase at the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras International in London, UK, on December 21, 2020. REUTERS
At England's main port of Dover - already blocked before this weekend as a symptom of the country's exit from the European Union - transport officials warned that new travel bans could wreak havoc on food supply chains. and goods days before Christmas.
France's Transport Minister, Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, mobilized to respond to these concerns, tweeting that "in the next few hours"
Europe would establish
sanitary
control measures
to allow the resumption of traffic flows.
Still, there has been chaos on the roads, train stations, and grocery stores.
People have been packing on trains to avoid new internal restrictions announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and stocking up on essentials for fear of a possible shortage.
Although governments around the world
are rushing to prevent the spread of this
newly identified coronavirus
strain
, different strains have already been detected in the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and Iceland.
[A 90-year-old woman from the UK is the first person to receive Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine]
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said at a briefing on Monday that the new strain appears to be
"significantly more transmissible than previously circulating variants
.
"
It is far from the first new variant of this coronavirus identified this year, and experts say there is no evidence that it is more deadly or that vaccines do not work against it.
The United States is not among the countries that have closed their borders,
and officials are resisting calls to do so.
"Today that variant is to get on a plane and land at the JFK," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters Sunday, referring to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
"How many times in your life do you have to make the same mistake before you learn?"
Under President Donald Trump's coronavirus travel ban,
most foreigners who have been to Europe in the past 14 days cannot enter the US
.
This does not apply to US citizens, legal residents, or their family members under the age of 21.
The United Kingdom tightens measures against the pandemic and limits the mobility of its citizens at Christmas
Dec. 19, 202000: 33
For the UK itself, which
is
already
struggling with one of the worst death rates from COVID-19
and the looming logistical chaos of Brexit, the closures reduced it to pariah status overnight.
On Saturday, Johnson made his last tour and asked tens of millions of people in the southeast of England to cancel Christmas plans, days after he assured them they could move on.
After imposing a strict new lockdown on two-thirds of the country,
Johnson blamed the emergence of the new variant
.
But experts have been warning for a month that his plan to allow people to mingle indoors for five days around Christmas would lead to more cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
[Mental health problems are exacerbated by the pandemic. But the resources to treat it are scarce]
The front page of the left-wing British tabloid The Daily Mirror called the UK the "Sick Man of Europe", a label attributed to several sick countries since the mid-1800s.
