But experts have warned that the use of border restrictions to keep out new variants has not previously worked well when only applied to particular countries. “Where border closures have had an impact they have applied to almost all arrivals,” said Prof Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh.
Prof Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, said while better genetic surveillance was important, he was not particularly concerned about the possibility of new variants emerging in China, given that the main driver for changes to the virus is the shift in the immune landscape resulting from exposure to different naturally circulating variants and vaccination.
