On December 31, the 11-month brexit transition period will end and the island will leave the EU customs union and the common market for good. The UK’s health service, the NHS, has asked for a stay of Brexit because of concerns that it would make fighting the epidemic more difficult.
In a letter to Boris Johnson, the prime minister, the NHS called for the transition period to be extended by another month. The letter warned that the number of new cases could rise further now that a highly contagious variant of the virus has emerged; But at the same time, health workers are already exhausted and the NHS could be overwhelmed by the extra burden of no deal Brexit. The NHS has therefore asked Mr Johnson to buy “precious few more weeks” to get overstretched hospitals “out of harm’s way”.
The UK’s health system is worried that if there is no agreement by the end of the brexit transition period on December 31, trade barriers and new tariffs will be imposed, which will seriously hamper the cross-border movement of medical supplies between the UK and the EU.
This week, European Union countries have closed their borders to Britain because of a new strain of the virus, shutting down the Channel Tunnel and ferry services, leaving trucks stranded on the British side. The NHS is concerned that cross-border logistics could be further blocked if Britain leaves the EU without a deal, with blocked roads even blocking ambulances.
Now, with just a week to Go until December 31, months of negotiations on a deal to leave the European Union have seen little progress, and hopes of reaching an agreement before the deadline are slim. This is bad news for a country that has already lost almost 70,000 lives to the outbreak.
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