The Omicron Covid variant was linked to travel from Nigeria, and the country was included on the red list.
People arriving in the UK from Nigeria have to stay in a hotel for 10 days and have two negative test results, as part of measures that came into force on Monday.
The Department of Health said that there were 21 Omicron cases in England. There are 134 reported cases in the UK.
The Nigerian high commissioner to London, Sarafa Tunji Isola, said he agreed with the UN secretary general, who criticized measures imposed by various countries against African nations.
Isola said that the Nigerian reaction to travel is called travel apartheid. Nigeria is aligned with the position of the UN secretary general that the travel ban is not an endemic situation, but rather a global approach to dealing with a pandemic situation.
He said that Omicron is classified as a mild variant. The issue is different from the Delta variant. The position has to be taken based on the evidence. It is not a situation of panic. We need to have the facts.
The UK minister for policing said the phrase was unfortunate.
We understand the difficulties that are created by these travel restrictions, but we are trying to buy a little bit of time so that our scientists at Porton Down can work on the virus and assess how difficult it is going to be for us to cope with as a country.
Labour supports the measures because there is a need to stop the spread of Omicron, according to the shadow home secretary. She said that it was the same thing that happened in the first wave and in the Delta wave.
Dozens of countries have imposed travel restrictions on African nations, which have yet to detect any cases of the variant. The debate over the effectiveness of border closings has been reignited and measures have been met with outrage and claims of scapegoating regions after South Africa raised the alarm about the new variant.
The UN Secretary-General said that banning specific countries or regions is not only unfair, but also ineffective. He said that they had the instruments to have safe travel. Let's use those instruments to avoid this kind of travel, I think it's unacceptable.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said last week it was "deeply concerning" that southern African countries were being "penalised by others for doing the right thing".
The ability of South African researchers to ship virus samples out of the country was limited by travel bans, according to the WHO. She said that they don't want to see countries punished for sharing information because this is how WHO and their partners make assessments.
African countries have condemned the bans. The president of South Africa said that the prohibition of travel is not informed by science. It won't be effective in stopping the spread of this variant. The prohibition on travel will only cause more damage to the economies of the affected countries and undermine their ability to respond to and recover from the Pandemic.
The president of Malawi wrote on Facebook thatvid measures must be based on science.
