Britain began testing trucker drivers for Covid-19 on Wednesday but said there were still severe delays and implored truckers to avoid southern England.
“Testing has begun as we look to get traffic moving again between the UK and France,” Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said.
“However, French border police only acting on agreement from this morning and severe delays continue. Please avoid Kent while the backlog is cleared. Arriving in the area will delay your journey,” he said on Twitter.
– WHO Wuhan probe not looking for Covid ‘guilty’ parties
The World Health Organization’s international mission to China to investigate the origins of Covid-19 will explore all avenues and is not looking to find “guilty” parties, a team member told AFP news outlet.
Investigators will head to China in January and to Wuhan, where the first cases were detected 12 months ago in the pandemic that has swept the world, causing giant global health and economic crises.
“The meetings we had so far with Chinese colleagues were really productive and very good,” said Fabian Leendertz from the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s central disease control body.
“My impression, at the moment, is that the Chinese – on the government, but also on the population level – they’re really interested in finding out what happened.”
Leendertz, 48, is an expert in zoonoses – infectious diseases that cross the species barrier – and is among 10 eminent scientists tasked by the WHO with trying to find the origins of the novel coronavirus and work out how it jumped from animals to humans.
A year after the first cluster was detected in Wuhan, they will travel to China for the first time on a mission expected to last between five and six weeks – the first two spent in quarantine.
The 10 scientists will also be accompanied by Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO expert on food safety and zoonoses.
“This is not about finding a guilty country or a guilty authority,” said Leendertz. “This is about understanding what happened to avoid that in the future, to reduce the risk.”
