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, CNBC writes.
People can only leave their homes to shop for essentials, work if they can’t from home, exercise, go to the doctor’s and escape domestic abuse, he said in an announcement Monday evening. Primary schools, secondary schools and colleges will also move to remote learning Tuesday, except in rare cases, he said.
“I completely understand the inconvenience and distress this change will cause millions of people and parents up and down the country,” Johnson said. “The problem isn’t that schools are unsafe for children … the problem is that schools may act as vectors of transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”
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.
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.
On Monday, the U.K. recorded 58,784 new cases, and has now reported more than 50,000 new coronavirus cases for seven days in a row.
“The number of deaths is up by 20% over the last week and will sadly rise further. … With most of the country already under extreme measures, it’s clear that we need to do more together to bring this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out,” Johnson said, noting that the mutated strain is estimated to be 50% to 70% more contagious.
Johnson warned earlier Monday that the U.K. had “tough, tough weeks to come” and there was “no question” tougher measures would be implemented.
Ahead of the announcement, more than three-quarters of England were living under the toughest level of restrictions.
On Monday afternoon, Scotland’s leader, Nicola Sturgeon, announced a new stay-at-home order for the country’s citizens from midnight. Schools in Scotland will remain closed until the beginning of February.
Keir Starmer, leader of the U.K.’s main opposition Labour Party, tweeted Sunday that Johnson “must put national restrictions in place within the next 24 hours.”
Coronavirus vaccines are the only bright spot in a pandemic that continues to rage across the U.K. and much of the West. On Monday, the U.K. began its rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after starting to deploy the Pfizer-BioNTech shot in December.
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