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Britain faces the prospect of tighter coronavirus restrictions as Labour leader Keir Starmer called for an immediate national lockdown amid rising infections and hospitalisations. Boris Johnson said his government acknowledged that tougher measures could be needed across the country as 454 new reported deaths brought Britain’s death toll from the virus above 75,000.
“It may be that we need to do things in the next few weeks that will be tougher in many parts of the country. I’m fully, fully reconciled to that,” he told the BBC.
“There are obviously a range of tougher measures that that we would have to consider.”
Hospitals in London are under such pressure that they are preparing to transfer patients to the southwest of England and a huge Nightingale hospital in the capital which has been mothballed for most of the pandemic is expected to reopen. Sir Keir said the virus was out of control and that new national restrictions needed to come within the next 24 hours.
“Let’s not have the prime minister saying ‘I’m going to do it, but not yet’, that’s the problem he has made so many times. Nationwide lockdown – the prime minister has hinted that that’s going to happen but he’s delaying again. And we can’t afford that again,” he said.
Protect children
The Labour leader said more school closures were inevitable after the government delayed the reopening of schools in some parts of England. The National Education Union said the government had failed to protect children and their families from the virus and that teachers had a legal right to refuse to work.
Mr Johnson said that although all measures were being kept under review, there was no doubt in his mind that schools were safe and that parents should send their children to schools that reopen on Monday. Local councils across England have been rebelling against the government’s decision to reopen schools and Mark Walport, a member of the government’s Sage group of scientific advisers, said the move had risks.
“We know transmission happens within schools, we know that a person between 12 and 16 is seven times more likely than others in a household to bring an infection into a household,” he said.
Britain will start administering the Oxford/AstraZeneca on Monday and the government hopes to vaccinate two million people a week by the end of this month. Britain has decided to delay giving the second dose of both the AstraZeneca and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines for up to 12 weeks in an effort to give partial immunity to as many people as quickly as possible.
Prof Robin Shattock, from the department of infectious disease at Imperial College London, said the advantage of a bigger gap is that more people might be prevented from going into hospital if they have received one dose of one of the vaccines.
“The potential risk is, if it’s a sub-optimal immune response, although it may reduce hospital admissions, it may give the virus a window to evolve mutations that may render the vaccine less efficacious in the future,” he told the BBC.
“So it’s really a judgment call. There’s no obvious right decision and people are trying to make the right balance over preventing the hospitals continuing to have high numbers of cases, versus the risks of not going for the full regime in the shortest possible time.”