New COVID-19 Strain is Spreading, Globally

Countries from one side of the world to the other are affected

Oy vey! (French for ‘gimme a break!’)

Shortly — within days — after Britain reported, late last week, a new, more easily transmittable strain of the COVID-19 virus, France and a couple of other countries shut their borders to travelers from the UK. But sadly, they didn’t act quick enough: France, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and Canada had reported cases of the new strain as early as Saturday.

Weirdly, as reported by the BBC, a couple found to be infected in Ontario, Canada had no known travel history or high-risk contacts.

Other places where the new strain has been reported include Singapore, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany. Cases in all of those places, Inside Daily Brief reports, were linked to people who had been in the U.K.

At least partly in light of this latest development in the fast-spreading virus, Japan is shutting its borders to most non-resident foreign nations for a month from December 28.

Meanwhile, the US has instituted a rule that travelers from the UK have to have a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of their arrival in the States. And that country has declared that, to date, more than one million people have received a first dose of vaccine against the disease.