‘Covid cases could hit 100,000 a day’
THE public must play its part to prevent future Covid-19 restrictions becoming necessary, the Health Secretary has said as he ruled out implementing the Government’s ‘Plan B’ for the moment.
Sajid Javid said people must get their Covid-19 vaccines and any booster shots, as well as doing things like wearing masks in crowded places.
Asked if people face a tightening of restrictions if they don’t, he said: “Am I saying that if we don’t do our bit, get vaccinated, all those behavioural changes that we can make, that we are more likely to face restrictions as we head into winter…? Then I am saying that. I think we’ve been really clear that we’ve all got a role to play.
“If not enough people get their booster jabs, if not enough of those people that were eligible for the original offer, the five million I’ve talked about that remain unvaccinated, if they don’t come forward, if people don’t wear masks when they really should, if they’re not washing their hands and stuff, it’s going to hit us all.
“And it would of course make it more likely we’re going to have more restrictions. Now we want to avoid those.
“We’ve set out what those restrictions might look like, we’ve set out the Plan B restrictions for example, and we all want to avoid those.
“We’ve got plenty of vaccines, and we just need people to come forward and play their part to help us to keep defeating this virus and going ahead and getting more and more back to normal each day.”
The Health Secretary repeated his warning that Covid-19 cases could reach 100,000 a day as the country enters a challenging winter period.
He said the UK was seeing ‘greater pressure’ on the NHS but the Government will “do what it takes to make sure that this pressure doesn’t become unsustainable, and that we don’t allow the NHS to become overwhelmed.”
Deaths ‘remain mercifully low’ at the moment, he said, but added: “We’ve always known that the winter months would pose the greatest threat to our road to recovery.”
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation which represents health bodies, warned ‘we risk stumbling into a winter crisis’ unless measures such as face masks and vaccine passports – the Government’s ‘Plan B’ – are introduced.
He called for ministers to come up with a “Plan C” of even tougher restrictions if those measures are insufficient to address pressure on the health service.
Latest Government figures show that a further 179 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of yesterday. As of 9am on Wednesday, there had been a further 49,139 lab-confirmed Covid19 cases in the UK.
Hospital admissions stand at 868 on average per day over the last seven days, up from 780 a week earlier, a rise of 11%.