Canada to impose hotel quarantine on travellers

Ottawa: Travellers coming to Canada will have to quarantine in hotels for up to three days under strict supervision and at their own expense, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Friday, citing concerns over new coronavirus strains.

Ottawa is also stepping up Covid-19 testing while Canadian airlines have agreed to cancel flights to sunbelt destinations until the end of April, Trudeau told a news conference. "Now is just not the time to be flying," he said.

The extra measures come as public health officials are increasingly concerned about the spread of more transmissible Covid-19 variants, as well as an uptick in Canadians taking foreign trips of late.

Starting next week, all incoming flights to Canada will be directed to land at one of only four airports -- in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. In addition to pre-boarding testing already required, travelers "as soon as possible in the coming weeks" will be given mandatory PCR testing upon arrival.

They will have to wait for those results at designated hotels for up to three days at their own expense, which Trudeau estimated will cost Can$2,000 (US$1,600). If their test comes back negative, they’ll be permitted to quarantine at home "under significantly increased surveillance and enforcement," Trudeau said.

Those with positive tests will be moved to a government quarantine facility. Air Canada, WestJet, Sunwing and Air Transat, meanwhile, have committed to suspending flights to all Caribbean destinations and Mexico starting Sunday.

Non-essential travelers showing up at Canada’s land border with the United States will also be required to show a negative test before entry. Canada last March closed its borders to most non-essential travelers, and required incoming travelers to quarantine for 14 days.

But several provincial leaders have called on the federal government for stricter measures and enforcement after a recent spike in the number of Canadians taking winter vacations abroad.Meanwhile, Germany will from Saturday ban most travellers from countries hit by new, more contagious coronavirus variants to prevent a surge in infection numbers, the government said Friday.

The move, set to last until February 17, is necessary "to protect the people of Germany and to limit the entry and rapid spread of the new virus variants", according to a government decree seen by AFP.

The affected countries are Britain, Ireland, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa, as well as the southern African kingdoms of Lesotho and Eswatini. The entry restrictions cover arrivals by air, bus, rail and sea, but several exceptions will be granted.

Germans and other nationals living in Germany are allowed to return, while passenger transits and freight traffic will also be unaffected.

Exemptions also include the entry of medical workers and people in other key jobs. The emergence of virus mutations in Britain, Brazil and South Africa, deemed more infectious than the original strain, has fuelled concern at a time when many nations are struggling to rein in the pandemic.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said earlier this week that he wanted to reduce flights into Germany to "almost zero". The European Union remains opposed to a blanket travel ban or closures of national borders, despite some members seeking tougher action.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday said all non-essential travel "should be strongly discouraged". Portugal, which has strong air links with Brazil, has seen an explosion in cases and on Thursday decided to limit foreign travel for two weeks.

Belgium has taken a similar step, putting a ban in place until March 1. Germany coped relatively well with the first coronavirus wave last spring but has been hit hard by a second wave in recent months.

Europe’s biggest economy renewed restrictions in November, shutting down bars and restaurants as well as culture and leisure facilities. Measures were tightened further in December, with schools and non-essential shops also ordered to close. The current shutdowns are set to last at least until mid-February.

The curbs appear to be paying off, with the daily infection numbers falling although the number of deaths every 24 hours remains high. The country has recorded over two million cases and more than 55,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

In a related development, Europe’s row with AstraZeneca worsened after Germany declined to recommend the firm’s coronavirus vaccine for older people, while the more contagious South African variant of the virus was detected for the first time in the already hard-hit United States.

With anti-virus restrictions being tightened worldwide again, the economic toll came into focus with the United States seeing its sharpest contraction in growth since 1946. UN data released Thursday also said the global tourism sector, battered by border closures and bans on mass gatherings, lost $1.3 trillion in revenue in 2020.

Given the world’s weariness over the pandemic that has now killed some 2.2 million people and infected more than 100 million, countries have been anxious to expedite vaccination campaigns.

There was encouraging news from US biotech firm Novavax, which said its two-shot vaccine showed an overall efficacy of 89.3 percent in a major Phase 3 clinical trial in Britain, and remained highly effective against a variant first identified there.

But other results showed it offered significantly less protection against a highly transmissible virus variant first identified in South Africa, which is spreading rapidly around the world. The European Union’s inoculation efforts were hit by an announcement from AstraZeneca that it could only supply a quarter of the doses it had promised for the first quarter of 2021.

The EU has demanded the drug maker meets its commitments by supplying doses from its UK factories, but Britain insists it must receive all of the vaccines it ordered. Adding to the row on Thursday was an announcement from Germany’s vaccine commission that it could not recommend AstraZeneca’s vaccine for those over 65 since there was not enough data to assess its efficacy.

AstraZeneca and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson immediately defended the vaccine, which has already been widely used in Britain on older people.