People arriving from Pakistan brought half of all the imported coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom since March, a report has found.
As a result of the United Kingdom refusing to close down travel from virus hotspots during the pandemic, over 65,000 people from Pakistan — most of whom are believed to hold British passports — arrived in the country since March 1st.
Pakistan, which is reporting around 4,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day, is considered a “high-risk” country for the virus, but despite the inability or unwillingness of the Pakistani government to introduce effective containment measures, travellers from the Islamic Republic have been free to flood into the country.
Officials in Whitehall are reportedly worried that the revelations could spark a backlash against attempts to establish so-called open-air bridges with EU nations. British officials are also concerned that they will now have little ground to criticise countries like Portugal for failing to block imported cases from its former colony of Brazil.
“We can’t take people off the list because they might import cases from their former colonies”, a Whitehall official told the paper.
