Covid, new South Africa variant: WHO meets, GB and Israel suspend flights

New variant of the coronavirus in South Africa, B.1.1.529, which according to the Guardian may be the worst ever identified. In the next few hours, the World Health Organization (WHO) will meet to determine whether the new South African variant should be classified as ” worrying ”, meanwhile saying it ” has a large number of mutations ”. Read also In the meantime, some countries have decided to introduce measures to avoid ” importation ”. These include Great Britain, which has temporarily suspended air links with South Africa, but also with Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Eswatini. So did Israel, which will ban its citizens from traveling to southern Africa. In India, on the other hand, arrangements were made to carry out ” rigorous screening and testing ” of travelers who had arrived from South Africa and to trace and test their contacts. New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson called the new variant “a real wake-up call for all of us, this pandemic is still ongoing.”