22 December 2020: More countries close their doors to Britain as alarm grows over a more contagious virus variant.

22 December 2020: Update on The Corona Pandemic – Yesterday should have been a day of breakthroughs. The EU approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, paving the way for millions of doses to be shipped to all 27European Union member states and Belgium confirmed that it will start inoculating the first patients on 27 of December. Instead, the news on the new variant of the coronavirus in the UK sent the world reeling. Most European countries introduced a travel ban from and to the UK. The Belgian government extended the ban on people travelling to our country from the UK by a further 24 hours and France imposed a 48-hour suspension of freight transit across the English Channel, leaving thousands of truck drivers stranded in their vehicles.News channels reported how these disruptions stoked fears of panic buying in British supermarkets and stocks in Europe were sharply lower. Is this mutated variant of the virus not present anywhere else in Europe? Maybe England is the country where most of these mutations were detected because they look for them. In Belgium the variant was already found in 4 samples out 2,000 taken from people that had tested positive for coronavirus. Whilst this reflex reaction is understandable it poses the questions if these restriction are not out of proportions. I guess the future will tell… Whatever the answer is the fact that there is a mutated version of the virus that is 70 percent more contagious than other variants is not good news. To cheer you up here is another picture of a desolate Ghent during this holiday season – Sint-Baafsplein, Ghent, Belgium.