Health Ministry calls meet today as mutant Covid goes ‘out of control’ in UK

LONDON: The Health Ministry has called a meeting on Monday of its joint monitoring group on Covid-19 to discuss a mutant coronavirus that has gone “out of control” in the UK, sources said.

Several European nations have banned flights to and from Britain. No policy decision has been taken by India on any flight ban from the UK but the matter will be thoroughly discussed, top governmnet sources said.

Britain has warned this new strain of coronavirus was “out of control”, and imposed a stringent new stay-at-home lockdown from Sunday. On Sunday, several European countries began banning flights coming from the UK as British government warned that a potent new strain of the virus was “out of control”.

Following the example of the Netherlands, where a ban on all UK passenger flights came into effect on Sunday, Germany, too, was considering a similar move. Belgium too said it was suspending flight and train arrivals from Britain from midnight. Italy is to join other European countries in imposing a ban on passenger flights from Britain, Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Sunday, as the British government warned that a potent new strain of the virus was “out of control”.

“The United Kingdom has issued an alert concerning a new strain of Covid-19,” Di Maio wrote on his Facebook account. “As the government, our duty is to protect Italians and for this reason… we will sign, with the health minister, a decree suspending flights to and from Britain,” he said, without specifying when the measure would come into effect. The moves come as around a third of England’s population entered a Christmas lockdown. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had said on Friday that millions of Britons would have to cancel their Christmas plans and stay home because the new strain was spreading far more quickly.

British Health Secretary Matt Hancock, speaking on Sky News, said the situation was “deadly serious.”

“It’s going to be very difficult to keep it under control until we have the vaccine rolled out,” he said. It seems that scientists first discovered the new variant in a patient in September.

Last week, Europe has become the first region in the world to pass 500,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the pandemic broke out a year ago, killing more than 1.6 million worldwide and pitching the global economy into turmoil.