Source::AP
LONDON,
Britain’s official death toll in the coronavirus pandemic passed 100,000 on Tuesday, a dreaded milestone reached as the government considered imposing hotel quarantines on international travelers to stop new virus variants reaching the country. The government said 100,162 people have died in the pandemic after testing positive for the virus, including 1,631 new deaths reported Tuesday. “it is hard to compute the sorrow contained in that grim statistic,” a somber Prime Minister Boris Johnson said. “The years of life lost, the family gatherings not attended and, for so many relatives, the missed chance even to say goodbye.”
Opposition politicians and public health officials accuse Johnson’s Conservative government of being slow to act throughout the outbreak when it has come to lockdowns and travel restrictions. A more transmissible new variant identified in southeast England late last year also helped push infections to new highs and plunged the country into its third lockdown. Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, a Conservative, said the biggest problem was that many people already in the U.K. do not comply with self-isolation orders.
“I think the elephant in the room in this is not the 10,000 or so people who arrive in the U.K. every day, it is the 30,000 people in the U.K. already who are asked to quarantine by Test and Trace and are not doing so,” Hunt told the BBC. He backed calls for a self-isolation payment from the government so people exposed to the virus or infected did not lose income by staying at home.
“We may also need to enforce more compliance, but I think you can only do that if you are making people a reasonable offer to support them financially for any losses they may have from having to stay home,” Hunt said. People arriving in the U.K. from abroad also must show they have tested negative for COVID-19. Britain recently banned direct flights from South Africa, Brazil and Portugal — and barred entry to travelers from there and some nearby countries — in response to new variants of the virus.
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