UK PRIME MINISTER IMPOSES NATIONAL LOCKDOWN AS NEW COVID-19 VARIANT SPREADS

Tue 05 January 2021:

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said England is adopting a national lockdown that he hopes will be tough enough to contain a new, highly contagious variant of Covid-19.

In Johnson’s fourth address to the nation since the pandemic began, he said the new mutant variant of COVID-19 was “frustrating and alarming” as it was between 50% and 70% more transmissible.

The U.K.’s chief medical officers recommended the country move to alert level 5, meaning that if the country doesn’t take action the National Health Service capacity “may be overwhelmed in 21 days,” Johnson said.

Johnson then announced a third national lockdown in England, asking people to “stay at home.”

There are limited exceptions: to work if you cannot work from home, shop for food and medicine, exercise, to provide care to a vulnerable person, or to attend medical appointments.

All primary and secondary schools as well as colleges will move to remote learning until the half-term in mid-February. Children of key workers and the vulnerable will still be able to attend.

He said that schools were “not unsafe” and that children were “very unlikely” to become seriously ill from COVID-19, but that nonetheless, schools could “act as vectors of transmission – causing the virus to spread between households.”

The changes come as the U.K. grapples with a more transmissible variant of Covid-19. To date, the country has recorded over 2.6 million cases of coronavirus and more than 75,000 related deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Before Johnson’s speech, the UK’s four chief medical officers representing each of the union’s four countries raised the UK coronavirus alert level from 4 to 5, its highest level, for the first time.

According to government information, Level 5 means “there is a material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed.”

The COVID alert level system is separate from the tier system operating in England.

The U.K. government has decided to implement a 12-week delay between the first and second doses of both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines, in a bid to cover as much of the population as possible.

The U.K.‘s independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies said Sunday that it endorsed the move, with conditions, however the British Medical Association has criticized the U.K.’s decision to delay second doses.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced earlier in the day a full national lockdown across all of mainland Scotland and most of its islands until the end of January effective as of midnight tonight.

“It is essential that we further limit interaction between different households to stem the spread and bring the situation back under control, while we vaccinate more people,” Sturgeon said.

“In short, we must return for a period to a situation much closer to the lockdown of last March.”

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