Second UK shutdown begins

Boris Johnson will announce national Covid restrictions today including early pub closing and a return to working from home as he starts to reverse the freedoms of recent months.

The prime minister will order all hospitality venues in England to close by 10pm from Thursday after the coronavirus alert status was raised to the second-highest level for the first time since June.

In a televised address to the nation, he will also tell people to return to home working where it does not detrimentally affect businesses, and will restate the need for mask-wearing, hand washing and social distancing.

It comes after the Government’s scientific advisers warned that coronavirus cases could increase to 50,000 per day by midoctober, with 200 or more deaths per day in November ‘‘if we don’t change course’’.

Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, suggested restrictions would be needed for another six months and said it was vital to ‘‘break unnecessary links’’ between households.

Johnson will for now stop short of the two-week ‘‘circuit breaker’’ lockdown some advisers had favoured, but ministers are so concerned about the rising rate of infections that they have discussed banning people from different households from mixing socially and scrapping the ‘‘rule of six’’.

Johnson is expected to hold that option in reserve, but senior government sources confirmed he will encourage people to go back to working from home if they have the blessing of their employer, in what will be a blow to catering and retail outlets that depend on office workers for their trade.

Cabinet ministers appear to be split on the severity of the restrictions that should be imposed, with Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, and Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, understood to be among those arguing the economic case for keeping restrictions to a minimum.

Johnson also faces a backlash from backbenchers who consider any reimposition of lockdown measures an unnecessary danger to the economy.

And more than 30 scientists, academics and medics wrote to the prime minister urging him to ‘‘step back’’ and ‘‘fundamentally reconsider’’ the Government’s response to the pandemic.

The authors, who include Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan of Oxford University, argued that imposing blanket restrictions, which affected healthy working-age people as well as the vulnerable, would do more harm than good in the long term. It came as Larry Kudlow, the White House adviser, said reports that ‘‘Britain might shut down’’ was ‘‘a great concern’’ yesterday. After Cabinet meeting this morning, Johnson will chair his first meeting of the Cobra emergency committee in four months, to be attended by the leaders of the four UK nations.

He will then make a statement in Parliament before his 8pm TV address.

As well as closing pubs and restaurants at 10pm, Johnson will make table-service-only law, meaning buying drinks at the bar will be illegal. In areas already under local lockdown restrictions, all pubs and restaurants may be closed altogether.

Other measures to be discussed at Cabinet will include the closure of indoor concert venues and a further delay to trials of spectators returning to professional sports.

A Downing Street spokesman said last night: ‘‘No one underestimates the challenges the new measures will pose to individuals and businesses but we must take further action to control the resurgence and protect the NHS.’’ Another 4368 people tested positive yesterday, with 11 deaths. The Joint Biosecurity Committee recommended the five-stage Covid alert level be returned to level four. In a televised address yesterday with Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, Prof Whitty said: ‘‘If we don’t do enough. the virus will take off – and we are going to find ourselves in a very difficult problem.’’ He added: ‘‘We have to break unnecessary links between households because that is the way in which this virus is transmitted. This means reducing social contacts whether they are at work . . . and in social environments.

‘‘We should see this as a sixmonth problem that we have to deal with collectively, it’s not indefinite.’’ – Telegraph Group