Covid: What is the government doing about the South Africa variant?

The health authorities in South Africa announced on 18 December that a new variant of Covid 19 had been identified and was driving a second wave of infections in the country.

The strain - called B.1.351 - carries one of the same mutations as the variant first seen in Kent, which makes it easier to spread.

On 23 December, the government announced that it had detected two cases of the South African strain in the UK.

On 8 February, the government said this number had grown to 147 cases.

On 24 December, a travel ban was imposed on South Africa. On 9 January, this was extended to nine other southern African countries.

UK residents and Irish nationals were exempted from this ban but were required to self-isolate for 10 days at home, according to the current travel rules.

This means they would have been permitted to use public transport to travel from the airport to their home or place of quarantine.

We asked the government how many people had come to the UK from South Africa - via third countries - since 24 December.

We were told it does not publish this information. The Office for National Statistics does not collect figures for indirect flights either.

Data from the Civil Aviation Authority shows that at least 19,800 passengers had flown between the two countries in December 2020, although many of those would have been before the ban came into force, and the figure includes those leaving the UK.

Some countries, such as the US, have also banned entry to non-residents who have been in South Africa recently, while several others such as Australia have long-standing bans on almost any non-residents entering their countries.

The UK government's "red list" of countries from which you are banned from flying to the UK has grown to over 30 and includes South America (where another strain of coronavirus has been identified).

Again, there's an exemption for UK and Irish nationals but from 15 February they will have to quarantine in a hotel, rather than at home.

Ravi Gupta, professor of microbiology at the University of Cambridge, believes an overall ban on non-residents coming to the UK from anywhere would have been better.

"The trouble with red lists is that we usually get the wrong countries, infected people come in by other routes and lists discourage countries trying to find new variants," he said.

But he stressed that travel restrictions had to be a short-term strategy to limit the outbreak, while encouraging manufacturers to make their vaccines better able to deal with the mutations, which he said would probably turn up in the UK eventually even with a total travel ban.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson was asked about a complete ban in Parliament on Wednesday 3 February and said: "It is not practical completely to close off this country," adding that the UK would instead have a tough regime at its borders and continue the vaccination programme.

Sage is the scientific advisory group, which helps inform the government's decisions.

On 22 December it raised "theoretical" concerns about the South Africa variant.

At its meeting on 7 January, Sage said that cases of the new South African variant continued to be found despite the imposition of travel restrictions two weeks earlier. It added that there were two potential cases which did not seem to be linked to travel.

Then at its meeting on 21 January, Sage said: "No intervention, other than a complete, pre-emptive closure of borders, or the mandatory quarantine of all visitors upon arrival in designated facilities, irrespective of testing history, can get close to fully preventing the importation of cases or new variants."

It also said that banning travellers from particular areas when new variants are found won't do the trick because it takes too long to identify the variants, there are relatively few countries carrying out the genome sequencing required to identify them, and people can come in via third countries.

It added that partial travel bans could delay the spread of an epidemic by a few weeks or months, but that in order to "meaningfully affect the magnitude of an epidemic", travel bans would be needed that stopped more than 90% of journeys.

Health secretary Matt Hancock told the Andrew Marr Show on 24 January that there were 77 known cases of the South African variant in the UK, and they had been under "very close observation".

He added that the majority of those could be traced back to contact with South Africa.

We asked the Department of Health and Social Care what "very close observation" involved but have not yet had a response.

It is also worth remembering that normal testing does not identify which variant of the virus a patient has - that can only be done by genome sequencing, which is currently carried out on between 5% and 7% of positive cases in the UK, and takes about three weeks.

That means it may have spread by the time it has been identified.

A study in South Africa has suggested that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine offered "minimal protection" against mild and moderate cases of the country's new Covid-19 variant. The South African government has suspended its rollout of the vaccine.

Prof Sarah Gilbert, the lead Oxford vaccine developer, said "we're going to need to keep a really close eye on the spread of the South African variant in the UK" but added that vaccines would still "offer protection against deaths, hospitalisations and severe disease".

She said developers were likely to have a modified jab by the autumn to combat the variant.

On 8 February, the government said that 147 cases of the South Africa variant had been uncovered in the UK.

On-the-spot doorstep tests, home testing kits and mobile testing units are being deployed in a number of areas where adults will be encouraged to take tests whether or not they are experiencing symptoms - in a process known as "surge testing".

Professor Lawrence Young from Warwick Medical School said he was sceptical about surge testing. "I'm not sure how it's going to contain infection given the time frame - it's likely to have already spread once it's been found," he said.

The areas involved include parts of Kent, Woking, Southport and Broxbourne, as well as parts of south, west and north London.

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