A new variant of the new coronavirus in South Africa and the borders are closing again: many European countries decided today to suspend flights from countries in the southern region of Africa, while other countries, such as Japan, imposed quarantine.
The location of this potentially more contagious and highly mutated new strain of the new coronavirus was announced yesterday, Thursday, in South Africa.
Despite recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO), which has advised against travel restrictions, Britain, France and the Netherlands have banned flights from South Africa and five neighboring countries from noon today.
The decisions were deemed “hasty” by the South African government and are a new blow to tourism just before the summer in the southern hemisphere, when wildlife parks and hotels are usually full.
“Our immediate concern is the damage this decision will do to the tourism and business industries,” said South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pantor.
The decision by many countries to close their borders is “hasty” and “catastrophic”, while tourism professionals in South Africa stressed, warning of an “avalanche” phenomenon throughout the economy.
“It’s an instinctive, early reaction,” Richard de la Rey, who manages nature sanctuaries and beach resorts in the area, which is now flooded with booking cancellations, told AFP. “We still do not know anything about the new variant, but we immediately predict the worst,” he said.
The European Commission today recommended that European countries suspend air links with countries where variant B.1.1.529 of SARS-CoV-2 has been identified.
-Crop of stock exchanges around the world-
European teams of the United Rugby Championship want to leave South Africa, where they were expected to take part in matches on the 6th day of the championship, which includes teams from Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland and South Africa.
Fears sparked by the new coronavirus variant, which emerged at a time when health constraints were causing social tensions and skepticism about COVID-19 vaccination remained, caused oil prices to fall and stock markets to plummet across the country. people.
Tokyo lost 2.53% at closing and Frankfurt and London more than 3% at opening. The CAC 40 index of the Paris Stock Exchange fell 3.33% at 13:10 Greek time.
Italy has already banned anyone staying in southern Africa “for the last 14 days” from entering its territory. In Asia, Singapore announced a similar ban on Sunday, with the exception of its citizens and permanent residents.
In Germany, where the limit of 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 was exceeded yesterday, Thursday, only German citizens will be allowed to return to the country from tonight, provided they observe a 14-day quarantine, even if vaccinated. announced the outgoing Minister of Health Jens Span.
“The last thing we need now is the introduction of a new variant that causes even more problems,” he said. Some hospitals in Germany are saturated and the issue of mandatory vaccination against COVID-19 for everyone in the country is on the table, as decided by Austria.
-The situation is evolving very fast-
“The situation is evolving very fast, we want to ensure that we do our utmost to slow down the transmission of this variant,” a European Commission spokesman told AFP.
It will take “weeks” to understand the level of transmissibility and impact of the new strain found in South Africa named B.1.1.529, a World Health Organization spokesman said today.
So far 22 cases of B.1.1.529 have been reported, mostly among young people, according to the South African National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD). Cases have also been reported in neighboring Botswana as well as in Hong Kong, where a traveler returning from South Africa was diagnosed.
Israel also announced today a case of the new mutant strain: “This is a man who has returned from Malawi”, the Israeli Ministry of Health clarified, expressing fears of “two additional cases” and noting that these are people who have returned from abroad and have been quarantined.
The three men had been vaccinated against COVID-19, the Israeli ministry added in a statement, without elaborating on the vaccine with which they had been vaccinated and how many doses they had received.
At this stage, South African scientists are unaware of the effectiveness of existing vaccines against the new variant of the virus.
It was recently announced that a new variant of the coronavirus strain has been identified in Belgium, the first European country to announce that it has diagnosed a case of the new variant.
“We now have a confirmed case of this variant. This is someone who returned from abroad. This person was diagnosed positive on 22 November and was not vaccinated,” said COVID-19, said Belgian Health Minister Frank Vanderbrooke.
-Immune system-
The new mutant strain has an “extremely high” number of mutations and “we can see that it can potentially be transmitted very quickly,” virologist Tulio de Oliveira said in a press conference with the South African Ministry of Health.
His team at the KRISO research institute, backed by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, had already discovered the delta strain, which is highly contagious, last year.
In South Africa, officially the country most affected in Africa by the new coronavirus, 23.8% of the population has been fully vaccinated.
“What worries us is that this variant may not only have increased transmission capacity, but also be able to bypass certain parts of our immune system,” said another researcher, Professor Richard Lessels.
At the WHO, experts monitoring the evolution of the virus that causes COVID-19 are meeting today to clarify the danger of the new variant of the coronavirus strain.
The German laboratory BioNTech, which works with Pfizer, said it expects “within two weeks” the first results of an investigation to determine whether the new mutant, found in South Africa, could escape the protection provided by vaccines.
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