British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today announced another national coronavirus quarantine in England, instructing people to once again stay home to contain a new strain of COVID-19, which scientists say will reach be 70 percent more contagious.
Given the “risk that health services are overwhelmed,” residents will be forced to stay home except for basic issues from Wednesday and at least until mid-February, he said. Scotland had recently announced a total lockdown from midnight through all of January.
“Therefore, we must enter a national lockdown, which is tough enough to contain this variant … That means the government is once again ordering them to stay home,” Johnson said in a televised speech.
Although the British prime minister called for caution, he added that “hospitals are under more pressure than at any time since the beginning of the pandemic.”
He also said that if the vaccination program schedule went according to plan and the number of cases and deaths responded to the closure measures, as expected, it should be possible to start coming out of lockdown in mid-February.
By mid-February, he hopes that the first dose of the vaccine will have been administered to the four priority groups in the immunization campaign: residents and nursing home workers, over 80 years of age, public health service workers (NHS, for its acronym in English) and the population with pre-existing diseases.
Britain is the sixth deadliest country in the world and daily cases are reaching a new record. The country’s top medical officials said the spread of COVID-19 threatened to overwhelm parts of the healthcare system within 21 days.
–
