Europe scrambled Monday to thrash out a coordinated response to a new strain of the coronavirus which has prompted an international suspension of travel links with the UK, while the United States saw its own caseload top 18 million.
This illustration photo taken on November 17, 2020 shows vials with Covid-19 Vaccine stickers attached, and syringes, with a flag of the European Union. The EU’s drug regulator authorised the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on December 21, 2020, and said there was no evidence it would not work against a new strain found mainly in Britain.
The World Health Organization’s emergencies chief Michael Ryan tried to temper the alarm by stressing the situation was not “out of control”, shortly after a British minister used those exact words to describe the new spread of the new variant. “It’s inhuman not to give people more notice. My boyfriend is out in Turkey, I want to get back to him,” said Beth Gabriel Ware, a 23-year-old Briton who recently came home to visit her parents — but is now among those stuck there longer than intended.
In the United States, 78-year-old President-elect Joe Biden received a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine live on television to boost Americans’ confidence in the shots.The UK strain has also been detected in small numbers in Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands, according to the WHO. In the pandemic’s first border closure among Scandinavian neighbours, Sweden barred travellers from neighbouring Denmark, in addition to the UK, because of the variant.
Americans, still suffering the world’s highest death tolls, were bracing for a bit of relief after lawmakers reached a deal Sunday on a nearly $900 billion Covid-19 financial package.