Julia Simpson, WTTC President & CEO, said: “WTTC supports the World Health Organization (WHO) position in calling for borders to remain open and safe travel to continue.

“Closing borders will not prevent the spread of new variants. The latest variant is increasingly being detected in countries around the world. The way to keep safe is to focus on the vaccination status of individual travellers rather than placing whole countries onto red lists.

“Rather than stigmatizing countries such as South Africa, which rely heavily on a strong Travel & Tourism, we should be applauding them for identifying this new variant so quickly.

“Until we fully understand this new variant we must focus on prioritizing the world distribution of vaccines while adopting sensible measures such as wearing masks"