A Wilderness Betrayed — Part 2
By: Daniel Clarkson
Tags: UK Politics, Wildlife Conservation, Covid 19, Travel, Kenya

The only Variant of Concern is GDP…

Well that was a disappointment.

Even in the context of a year of bad news for the travel industry last week’s grand ‘review’ (slowly leaked over the course of the day to some friendly newspapers rather than made in front of the cameras and journalists of the press room) was a low point.

Typically, most media and public outrage centred on Portugal coming off the green list.

Personally, I am less concerned with Portugal coming off the list than I am about how these decisions are being made and the lack of consistency in application of data collected by the much-talked of Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC).

As an aside, if there is one thing this government is exceptional at, it is creating grand names for entities that seem to do nothing — think Global Travel Taskforce, a group whose sole goal for months was to open up international travel safely and who created the ‘traffic light system’ which is working so well.

Nevertheless, according to the JBC website, the JBC “has developed a dynamic risk assessment methodology to inform ministerial decisions on red, amber and green list countries and the associated border measures against the risks of importing cases of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants”.

As I have stated previously, however, nowhere do they explain exactly how they use the data in terms of thresholds but it is clear that “importing cases” and “variants” appear to be the key risks that the methodology seeks to mitigate.

The JBC goes on further to say that a red-list country presents “a high public health risk to the UK from known variants of concern (VOC), known high-risk variants under investigation (VUI) or as a result of very high in-country or territory prevalence of COVID-19.”

Clear enough.

Following Matt Hancock’s stressing that it is “regrettably” not safe yet to travel (all while sporting the biggest smile on a face loaded with forced sombreness), it is unclear whether Mr Hancock or Grant Shapps hates the travel industry more these days.

The esteemed Secretary of State for Transport, on whose shoulders depends the wellbeing of thousands of travel industry workers and companies, was at pains to say that he “couldn’t take the risk” of adding more countries to the green list in case it impacted the precious 21 June unlocking.

Between the two of them, presumably, the idea of having youths getting routinely pissed clubbing until 3am is far less risky than allowing those same youths to do it overseas after taking a test to get there and one (or several) to get back. Or for families to be reunited after months apart. Or for those countries (and indeed our own) desperate for tourism to save jobs, homes, families and livelihoods.

I am certain that the government’s (political) scientists have done their homework and concluded that the votes potentially lost from the travel industry do not exceed the votes gained from the now, or soon to be, 18 year olds who will vote in the next elections thrilled in the knowledge that their freedoms to drink and sweat all over each other were not held up one second longer for the sake of a relative few forgotten travel workers or poverty-induced citizens of countries they cannot point to on a map.

Be that as it may, however, if rationals look at what the JBC insists is used to inform ministers in their decision-making, it seems utterly incomprehensible how some countries escape the dreaded red brush whilst others are included and still others move from red to amber whilst improving their figures.

A comparison of countries’ RAG statuses and their public health data (using the JBC’s own methodology, with Kenya as a base) begins to highlight the inconsistencies.

The data show that France has a current infection rate (as at 3 June) 21x greater than Kenya. Malaysia has an infection rate 36x greater and is facing rapidly increasing levels of infection (up 60% on a bi-weekly basis). Indeed from the above, Kenya has lower current infection rates per 100,000 than all bar Singapore.

Curiously, looking at the changes to the lists, Costa Rica has moved from the amber list to the red list while their infection rate is actually decreasing posing the question as to why they were on the amber list to begin with.

Were they even reviewed previously?

Malta has an infection rate less than half what Portugal had when it was added to the green list three weeks ago and has more than double the vaccination doses administered yet it cannot crack the elite group.

I had presumed that vaccination doses administered was the key risk factor in the methodology given that, having looked at variant arrivals from specific countries previously, this was the only area I could see where Kenya fell down in its comparison with others. Clearly, this is not the case.

Regardless, vaccination doses administered fails to take into account which vaccine has been used. For example in Chile where they have administered nearly 99 doses per 100 people there are currently surging cases primarily due to the ineffectiveness of the Chinese Sinovac vaccine. The UK has a similar dosage rate of 97 and yet has an infection rate nearly 8x lower using different vaccines.

Moving on from “in-country or territory prevalence of COVID-19” to these dreaded Variants of Concern, instead of looking at arrivals from specific countries we can examine the breakdown of the total number of sequenced South African and Indian Variants of Concern in England and their relationship to travel.

What is immediately apparent is that overall, over a period of only 2 months (the first case of the Indian Variant in the UK was 18 March), there has been a nearly 11x greater impact from the Indian Variant than the South African Variant has had over 5 months.

Moreover, in the two-weeks leading up to India’s addition to the list as well as the two weeks following (4 weeks to 5 May), there were more cases of the Indian Variant directly from travelling than there were in total from travelling with the South African variant over 5 months (432 in 4 weeks compared to 404 in 5 months).

In fact, for the period 21 Feb to 7 April there were a total of 171 cases of the SA variant from travelling. From prior analysis, Kenya accounted for 12 of those. At the same time, arrivals from South Africa accounted for zero cases indicating that the majority of the SA-variant cases relating to travelling were not coming from Africa given that Ethiopia (the only other major sub-saharan African travel hub) also accounted for zero (it was red-listed 19 March).

Even looking at ‘unknown’ countries (where travellers failed to declare origin on their arrival form), the total number of Variants detected was 50 over this period. Even if every single one of those travellers came from Kenya, Ethiopia or South Africa, the total from Sub-Saharan Africa would still be only a third of the total.

Arrivals from India from 21 Feb to 7 April had a total of 79 Variants sequenced. In the same period, the cases of the Indian Variant related to travel totalled 39. Therefore, it can be argued that as only half of the Variants detected from India were the Indian Variant, in the time leading up to Kenya’s addition to the red list, far more of the South African Variant cases arrived from India than Kenya given that the two Variants account for almost all travel-related cases.

In order to further determine the risk posed by Variants, the JBC looks at data provided by GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data) which looks at both the share of tests undertaken in each country, sequenced and then shared to GISAID as well as the median average time between sequencing and sharing.

The higher the percentage of tests sequenced and shared the better. Conversely, the longer the median time taken to share the data the less accurate for reflecting current trends and therefore a shorter timeframe is more desirable.

Kenya is similar to the USA, Malta and Portugal at having relatively short submission timeframes of about 23 days.

For the same periods, this is significantly below Barbados and Greece as well as below both Malaysia and Spain. In fact, the only countries that have a consistently significantly shorter median time to submission are Singapore and the UK.

In terms of percentage of tests shared, Kenya sequences and shares 0.5% of tests. This is comparable with Malta (0.53%) and France (0.67%) and significantly above Barbados (0.13%), Malaysia (0.14%) and Chile (0.16%).

The only countries looked at who have significantly better percentages are Spain (0.84%, amber), Portugal (0.94%, green to amber), the USA (1.56%, amber) and the UK (9.37%).

However, when the percentage of tests sequenced is looked at relative to that country’s GDP per capita, the results are striking.

Colours indicate RAG status. Graduated colours indicate changing RAG status. Bubble size reflects proportion of tests compared to GDP

Kenya is sequencing far more, as a proportion of GDP than any other country and yet, dare I say it, GDP appears to have a stronger correlation to RAG status than percentage of tests sequenced.

Given the comparable figures for percentage of tests shared, the low levels of historical and current infection, the fact that Kenya could not afford to blindly procure vaccines before they were known to be effective and that, as shown, the simple statistic of vaccine doses administered is a poor metric for success against the countries’ epidemics anyway, how can the UK government continue to include Kenya on the red list?

It is past time for them to be as transparent as their data.

Grant Shapps is supposedly in government to nurture, protect and fight for the travel industry in the UK.

What he and his colleagues are doing instead is partaking in the wilful destruction of an entire industry. Worse, they are wiping out livelihoods not just in the UK, but abroad.

In the week when we are cutting foreign aid, one of the biggest things we can do is open up Global Britain to global travel.