The UK will come down hard on the South African variant of the CCP virus, Britain’s Health Secretary said on Monday, as the government ramped up its effort to contain the variant’s spread in the country.
Those cases are the first in the UK of community transmission of the variant, which is more transmissible and is thought to be more resistant to some vaccines.
“There’s currently no evidence to suggest this variant is any more severe, but we need to come down on it hard, and we will,” Hancock said.
“We’ve already made sure that all these cases are isolating and that we’ve done enhanced contact tracing of all of their close contacts. We are surging extra testing into the areas where this variant has been found and sequencing every single positive case.”
The Department of Health and Social Care later confirmed that other cases had emerged in London, Walsall in the West Midlands, Hertfordshire, Essex, near Maidstone in Kent, and near Preston in Lancashire.
Hancock said, “Working with local authorities, we are going door-to-door to test people in the local area.”
He urged people in the affected areas to get tested “so that we can break the chains of transmission of this new variant.”
The UK is doing this “because a mutation in one part of the world is a threat to people everywhere,” Hancock said.
He said 9.2 million people across the UK have now received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
“We’ve now vaccinated almost nine in ten of all over 80s in the UK and now, as of today, we’ve vaccinated over half of all people in their 70s,” he said.
Hancock said the government will protect UK supply but will also “play our part to ensure the whole world can get the jab,” because he believes that vaccine roll-out is “a global effort.”
