The Government has defended its border restrictions as officials said they were monitoring "very closely" the new Brazilian variant in the UK.
Speaking at the latest Downing Street press conference, Health Secretary Matt Hancock defended the Government’s border arrangements following the detection of the cases of the Manaus variant.
He said home quarantine measures were already in place - and told the conference that travel restrictions on Brazil had been imposed before the hotel policy was implemented.
His words came as Dr Susan Hopkins, of Public Health England, said they were tracking “very closely” the new Brazilian P1 coronavirus variant after the discovery of six cases in the UK.
“We are tracking it very closely because it shares some important mutations with the variants first identified in South Africa,” she told a Downing Street news briefing.
“These and other mutations are associated with reduced impact of antibodies against the virus in laboratory experiments.
“The current vaccines have not yet been studied against this variant and we will need to await further clinical and trial data to understand the vaccine effectiveness against this variant.”
She said officials were in the process of trying to track down the one person who has yet to be identified who is believed to have taken a test on February 12 or 13.
Mr Hancock said: “All the evidence is that the five cases that we know about followed those quarantine rules and that, I hope, is very reassuring to people.
“There is no evidence that the sixth case did not follow those quarantine rules – we need to obviously get in contact with the person in question.”
The test was taken on February 12 or 13 and “we haven’t seen any further knock-on transmissions in the data”.
