Victoria considers closing border to Britain due to mutant coronavirus strain

Victoria could move to ban Australians returning from the UK as a new coronavirus strain runs rampant – infecting 58,784 residents in one day. 

Police Minister Lisa Neville suggested Australia could look to close its airports to flights from Britain due to the ‘concerning’ new variant.

‘You cannot look at the UK and not be concerned about it,’ she said during Victoria’s daily coronavirus update on Tuesday.

Australia has so far identified at least eight cases of this particular strain in arrivals from Britain, including three in Perth on Tuesday. 

Ms Neville said Victorian deputy chief health officer Allen Cheng would float the idea during an Australian Health Protection Principal Committee meeting on Tuesday. 

It’s understood he will ask the AHPPC to conduct modelling on the risks associated with accepting returnees from Britain. 

Victoria has also called for UK’s coronavirus strain to be addressed by the national cabinet. 

A senior state government official has referred to the British variant as ‘radioactive, toxic material, wildly infectious’.

It is believed to be up to 70 per cent more infectious than the original.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday night ordered England into a new national lockdown until at least mid-February. 

NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant on Tuesday said there was ‘no one silver bullet’ to keep the community safe from variant viruses which are moving across the world. 

‘Just because you’re tested a couple of days before you get on the plane, you can develop the infection on the plane, you can develop as you’re getting off the plane, or the next day,’ she said. 

‘It is about that universal approach, making sure we treat anyone with Covid as highly infectious and making sure we go through all of the end to end chains to ensure that we don’t have any incursion events in our community.’

Acting Premier John Barilaro said measures would always be put in place to protect Australians.

‘We’re learning, like any other nation, there’s no playbook or rule book that shows you how to manage a global pandemic at the scale we’ve seen,’ he said on Tuesday.

Another international strain – a South African variant – was detected in a woman who arrived in Queensland on December 22 who went straight into hotel quarantine.

More than 30 countries around the world have recorded cases of the South African or UK coronavirus variants, including the US, Lebanon, Singapore, Pakistan, India, South Korea, Japan, France, Germany and Italy.

The World Health Organisation is yet to determine whether the new variants could undermine COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out around the world.