When the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom addressed the nation on December 20, the news was bad: Christmas was canceled.
Boris Johnson plunged the country into new severe restrictions, blaming a new variant of the disease that had been spreading in London and southeastern England since September.
But suddenly, things got even worse. Country after country closed their borders for flights from the United Kingdom, in an attempt to keep the new variant confined to the “island of the plague” as the New York Times dubbed it.
With ferry routes blocked by the English Channel, trucks carrying goods to the mainland stopped for miles along the highways. Eventually, a local airport in Kent was transformed into a parking lot for 4,000 trucks. Nothing could enter the UK either. It was, the wags said, proof of what a Brexit without business would be like.
This non-agreement was avoided – the government signed an agreement with the EU on 24 December. But the crisis is far from over.
UK travelers are still prohibited from entering much of the world – including EU countries – because of the local variant.
And while the United Kingdom was the first country in the world to start launching a vaccine, its good news was hampered by the January 13 report that Covid-19’s death count exceeded 100,000. Two days later, the government announced that it was cutting its last remaining “travel corridors”.
Inbound travel is a lucrative business for the UK – before Covid, Visit Britain predicted that 2020 would see 32.3 million visitors injecting £ 24.7 billion ($ 33.6 billion) into the economy.
In the end, 2020 saw a 76% drop in visitor numbers and an 80% drop. The tourism board is forecasting 16.9 million visits and £ 9 billion ($ 12.2 billion) of spending in 2021: a mere 41% and 32% of the 2019 figures, respectively. But that is, of course, if people come. After all, who would like to spend their holidays on the “island of plague”?
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