LONDON - Travel to the United Kingdom (UK) from South America and Portugal is to be banned from Friday amid concerns over the Brazilian strain of Covid-19 discovered earlier this week
The new variant was detected in four people who had travelled from Brazil to Tokyo earlier this month.
The mutation E484K, which the Brazilian variant shares with the South African strain discovered last month, may evade antibodies, allowing reinfections and rendering vaccines less effective.
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps tweeted that he had taken the decision to ban travel from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela as of 4pm tomorrow.
In a second tweet, Shapps added that travel to and from Portugal will also be banned due to “its strong travel links with Brazil”.
The new variant was detected in four people who had travelled from Brazil to Tokyo earlier this month. The mutation E484K, which the Brazilian variant shares with the South African strain discovered last month, may evade antibodies, allowing reinfections and rendering vaccines less effective.
The Times’ science editor Tom Whipple says it is “troubling” that the variant’s origin appears to be Manaus because it was thought that the Amazonian city, once one of the hardest-hit in the world, had reached herd immunity.
Last summer, excess deaths dropped from about 120 per day to “practically zero”, leading health chiefs to speculate that the city may have achieved “some kind of collective immunity”.
