Foreign Desk Report
DOVER, (England): The United Kingdom was stuck in COVID-19 isolation on Tuesday after much of the world cut off travel ties due to a highly infectious new coronavirus strain, halting one of Europe’s most important trade routes just days before the Brexit cliff edge.
With queues of trucks snaking to the horizon in England and supermarket shelves stripped just days before Christmas, British PM Boris Johnson scrambled to get French President Macron to lift a ban on freight from UK. Johnson and his advisers said the mutated variant of the novel coronavirus, which could be up to 70% more transmissible, was spreading rapidly but that it had been identified because British scientists were so efficient at genomic surveillance.
