Julia Buckley, CNN • Updated 18th January 2021 FacebookTwitterEmail (CNN) — When the UK Prime Minister addressed the nation on December 20, the news was bad enough: Christmas was canceled. Boris Johnson plunged the country into harsh new restrictions, blaming a new variant of the disease that had been spreading in London and the southeast of England since September. But suddenly, things got even worse. Country after country closed their borders to flights from the UK, in a bid to keep the new variant confined to "plague island," as The New York Times dubbed it. With ferry routes across the Channel blocked, trucks carrying goods to the continent backed up for miles along the motorways. Eventually, a local airport in Kent was turned into a parking lot for 4,000 trucks. Nothing could get into the UK, either. It was, said the wags, a taster of what a no-deal Brexit would be like.