As the US and European countries close their borders over fears over the recently detected coronavirus variant, many South Africans say they feel as if they are being “punished” for alerting global health authorities.

Hours after South African scientists announced the existence of a new variant that they said displayed “a big jump in evolution”, Britain banned travellers from southern African nations. Other European nations and the US quickly followed suit.

“I do apologise that people took a very radical decision,” said Tulio de Oliveira, director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform and the scientist who announced the new variant on Thursday.

Fresh from a virtual meeting with global health leaders, including Dr Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser on the coronavirus, Oliveira told journalists he believed that international solidarity would be in favour of South Africa’s decision to publicise its findings.

The variant, named Omicron by the World Health Organisation, was first detected in South Africa and in neighbouring Botswana. The government in Botswana said four initial cases were all foreign diplomats who had since left, and that contact tracing was continuing.

The economies of South Africa and Botswana are reliant on tourists from the US, Europe and China. South Africa’s tourism minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, described the temporary travel bans as “devastating”. Earlier this year, South Africa had lobbied UK to lift a previous ban that had already crippled tourism.

“We had been on the British red list and we worked our way out of it and with no notification we find ourselves back on the red list,” Sisulu told a national TV station.

“Perhaps our scientists’ ability to trace some of these variants has been our biggest weakness,” Sisulu said. “We’re finding ourselves punished for the work that we do.”

Health officials in Africa suggested that increased screening at points of entry, or even longer quarantine periods, would have been a better alternative. “This will just discourage different countries for sharing information which might be very important for global public health,” said Thierno Balde, incident manager for the Covid-19 emergency response for the WHO’s regional office in Africa.

New York Times News Service