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Just to provide some anecdotal evidence in support of the blockade: here in Amsterdam, there are (or were before the weekend) still groups of UK tourists arriving, clearly not quarantining on arrival, going from coffee shop to supermarket to takeaway place. I was imagining that it would only increase around christmas / new year. Indeed the mutated strain has already been found here, but I can imagine that not blocking UK travellers would lead to a lot more of this new strain. Netherlands is already in a bit of a precarious place (thank you Black Friday) so they're keen to keep it as locked down as possible.
tb
Stonehedge
To give people an idea of how much genome analysis the UK does compared to the rest of the world, apparently the UK identified 120,000 of the 270,000 known global Covid-19 mutations.
I'm not suggesting that blockading us is a bad idea, its more that I really do think that it is more likely than not that this mutation has jumped to the rest of the world in the course of the last 3 months since it was identified.