Stay at home plea as experts pan ‘lax’ rules
SCIENTISTS say Britain’s lockdown needs to be much stricter.
They warned the current rules are too soft to stop the virus as the number of UK cases passed three million.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson begged families to stay at home before launching a new advert aimed at scaring people into obeying the rules.
The hard-hitting campaign, which features England’s Chief Medical Officer Prof Chris Whitty, warns “people will die” if they breach rules.
Virus experts are demanding tighter restrictions and say meeting other people now carries more risk than in the first wave of the pandemic.
Prof Robert West, from the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours, said the rules allow “a lot of activity which is spreading the virus”.
He said it was “as we have the more infectious variant, around 5% more infectious than last time round in March”.
He added: “That means that if we were to achieve the same result as we got in March we would have to have a stricter lockdown, and it’s not stricter. It’s actually less strict.” Susan Michie, a professor of health psychology advising the SAGE committee, agreed that the lockdown was “lax”.
She said: “This is quite a lax lockdown. We’ve got a lot of household contact, people go in and out of other people’s houses if they’re a cleaner or a non-essential trade person.
“We also have mass gatherings in terms of religious events and nurseries being open. And you have this wide definition of critical workers so we have 30-50% of classes full.”
Meanwhile 12 people were arrested for breaching Covid rules at a lockdown protest yesterday in Clapham, southwest London, Met Police said.