New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday that local authorities will be making in-person visits to travelers from the United Kingdom to make sure they understand that they need to quarantine and that they will also face penalties if they refuse to do so.
“Every single traveler coming in from the United Kingdom will receive a department of health commissioner’s order directing them to quarantine,” de Blasio said in a press briefing on Wednesday morning. “This will be a personal and direct order — to every single one of them — telling them they must quarantine.”
Although de Blasio suggested that the mandated quarantine orders were for every traveler, he emphasized that travelers from the U.K. would receive even more scrutiny than travelers from other places.
“We are going to have sheriff’s deputies go to the home or the hotel of every single traveler coming in from the U.K,” said de Blasio, adding that the purpose of the visit was to ensure that U.K. travelers were abiding by their quarantine orders.
“If they are not, they will be penalized. We cannot take chances with anyone who travels, particularly folks traveling in from the U.K,” he said.
New York has a mandator 14-day quarantine period for travelers who have been gone from the state for more than 24 hours. However, the state offers a way to “test out” of the quarantine for travelers from other states, territories, and specific countries, following a four-day quarantine.
De Blasio said the penalty for breaking the quarantine order is $1,000, plus an additional $1,000 fine for each extra day spent violating the order.
#BREAKING: Mayor Bill de Blasio announces new “tough rules” for UK travelers: “We’re going to have sheriff’s deputies go to the home or the hotel of every single traveler coming in from the UK.” pic.twitter.com/DDo7RfpkFZ
— The Hill (@thehill) December 23, 2020
The U.K. government has been enacting its own restrictions to limit the spread of the coronavirus variant strain, which local health officials worry has the potential to spread more easily.
“The new variant makes everything so much harder because it spreads so much faster,” said Matt Hancock, the British health secretary, reports The New York Times.
Dr. Moncef Slaoui, a top doctor for Operation Warp Speed, told CNN earlier this week that the structure of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus strain responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, means that the virus is not very susceptible to significant mutations.
“The key is that the spike protein requires really very, very specific three-dimensional structure that makes it hard for it to mutate too much,” explained Dr. Slaoui. “So, up to now, I don’t think there has been a single variant that would be resistant to the virus — to the vaccine. We can’t exclude it, but it’s not there now. And this particular variant in the U.K., I think, is very unlikely to have escaped the vaccine immunity.”