Another variant of the Covid is being announced as travel from Asia still is active to America. Andrew Cuomo is questioning why six flights are arriving at JFK Airport daily from the United Kingdom, despite a new variant of the virus spreading there.
Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium are all halting flights. The measures vary and are initially short-term but the French rules also affect Channel freight.
The European Union scrambled Monday to hammer out a coordinated response to a mutated strain of the coronavirus sweeping Britain after countries cut transport links from the UK. The new variant has spread quickly in London and south-east England. Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Saturday introduced a new tier-four level of restrictions for those areas, scrapping a planned relaxation of rules over the Christmas period for millions of people.
Experts from the bloc’s 27 member states held a three-hour crisis meeting in Brussels to come up with options on how to standardize the measures put in place to try to curb the spread of the new variant.
Top health officials said that there was no evidence the new variant was more deadly, or would react differently to vaccines, but it was proving to be up to 70% more transmissible. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the new strain “was out of control. We have got to get it under control”, admitting that this was “an incredibly difficult end to frankly an awful year”.
Major new restrictions were imposed by key European nations. The Netherlands, England, France, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Austria Bulgaria, Turkey, has temporarily banned all flights from the UK as has Switzerland.
The new variant was first detected in September. In November it made up around a quarter of cases in London. This reached nearly two-thirds of cases in mid-December.
Three things are coming together that means it is attracting attention:
- It is rapidly replacing other versions of the virus
- It has mutations that affect part of the virus likely to be important
- Some of those mutations have already been shown in the lab to increase the ability of the virus to infect cells
All of these come together to build a case for a virus that can spread more easily. However, we do not have absolute certainty. New strains can become more common simply by being in the right place at the right time – such as London.
This variant is unusually highly mutated. The most likely explanation is it emerged in a patient with a weakened immune system that was unable to beat the virus. There is no evidence yet to suggest the variant makes the infection more deadly, and at least for now, the developed vaccines will almost certainly work against it. However, if the virus changes so it dodges the full effect of the vaccine, then “vaccine escape” happens, and this may be the most concerning element.
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