Global authorities reacted with alarm on Friday to a new coronavirus variant detected in South Africa, with the EU and Britain among those tightening border controls as scientists sought to find out if the mutation was vaccine-resistant.
Hours after Britain banned flights from South Africa and neighbouring countries and asked travellers returning from there to quarantine, the World Health Organization (WHO) cautioned against hasty measures.
But European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said the EU also aimed to halt air travel from the region.
Scientists are still learning about the variant, identified this week, but the news pummelled global stocks and oil amid fears what new bans would do to already shaky economies across southern Africa.
The variant has a spike protein that is dramatically different to the one in the original coronavirus that COVID-19 vaccines are based on, the UK Health Security Agency said, raising fears about how current vaccines, successful against the more familiar Delta variant, will fare.
“As scientists have described, (this is) the most significant variant they’ve encountered to date,” British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told Sky News.
The WHO was holding a meeting in Geneva, with experts discussing the risks the variant, called B.1.1.529, presents, WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said.
For now, it warned against travel curbs.
“At this point, implementing travel measures is being cautioned against,” Lindmeier told a U.N. briefing in Geneva. “The WHO recommends that countries continue to apply a risk-based and scientific approach when implementing (curbs).”
Nearly 100 sequences of the variant have been reported and early analysis shows it has “a large number of mutations” requiring further study, Lindmeier said.
British health minister Sajid Javid said the new variant had probably spread to other countries.
“The sequence of this variant … was first uploaded by Hong Kong from a case of someone travelling from South Africa,” Javid told lawmakers.
“… Further cases have been identified in South Africa and in Botswana, and it is highly likely that it has now spread to other countries.”
Israel barred its citizens from travelling to southern Africa as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said a few cases of the variant had been reported there,
Israel’s Ynet news website reported that, according to the Health Ministry, one of those individuals had received a third shot, or booster, of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine two months ago. A Health Ministry spokesperson could not confirm the report.
“We are currently on the verge of a state of emergency,” Bennett said, according to a statement from his office.
The coronavirus has swept the world in the two years since it was first identified in central China, infecting almost 260 million people and killing 5.4 million.
