BRITAIN RETURNS TO STRICT LOCKDOWN
Johnson institutes new restrictions as virus variant spreads
LONDON
Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed a strict new national lockdown Monday as Britain’s desperate race to vaccinate its population risked being overtaken by a fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus that was on track to overwhelm the nation’s beleaguered hospitals.
After several days of frighteningly high and escalating case numbers, Johnson ordered schools and colleges in England to close their doors and shift to remote learning. He appealed to Britons to stay at home for all but a few necessary purposes, including essential work and buying food and medicine.
The nationwide restrictions, officials warned, will remain in place until at least the middle of February.
The decision was a fresh setback for Johnson, coming at a time when the arrival of two vaccines appeared to provide a route out of the crisis after nine fraught months and fierce criticism of his handling of the pandemic.
On the day that the first doses of a vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford were administered, the good news was drowned out by the reintroduction of the type of sweeping restrictions used last spring when the pandemic first threatened to run out of control.
In recent weeks, a new, highly transmissible variant of the virus has taken hold in London and southeast England, prompting an alarming spike in case numbers and putting hospitals under acute pressure.
On Sunday, Johnson admitted that the current controls on daily life were insufficient. But the first announcement of a full-scale
lockdown came not from him but from Scotland, where the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has consistently moved further and faster in efforts to try to tame the pandemic.
Speaking in Edinburgh, Sturgeon said that people in mainland Scotland would be required to stay at home and to work from there where possible, while places of worship would be closed and schools would operate largely by remote learning.
Johnson followed Monday evening to announce the lockdown in England that many had predicted was inevitable.
“It’s clear that we need to do more together to bring this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out,” Johnson said in a televised address.
Though the weeks ahead
may be some of the hardest yet, he said he believed Britain was “entering the last phase of the struggle, because with every jab that goes into our arms we are tilting the odds against COVID and in favor of the British people.”
People in England were being encouraged to obey the new rules immediately, though some of the new restrictions will not be given legal force until Wednesday morning, and there is likely to be a vote in Parliament, which is being recalled on the same day.
Ministers had been celebrating the deployment of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is not only cheaper but also much easier to store than the authorized alternative from Pfizer, saying it could turn the tide in Britain’s battle with the co
ronavirus.
But Britain is involved in a high-stakes race to roll out its mass vaccination program before its country’s overstretched health service is overwhelmed by the new variant. Non-COVID treatment is again being postponed and pictures of ambulances stacking up in the parking lots of some hospitals last week illustrated the challenge faced by the country’s weary health workers.
The government has raised its COVID alert to its highest level for the first time, one that warned of a “material risk of health care services being overwhelmed.”
On Monday, there were more than 26,000 COVID-19 patients in hospitals, an increase of 30 percent from the previous week, Johnson’s office said. And cases are rapidly rising across the coun
try, it said.
Johnson has set an ambitious target for the country’s vaccine drive: administering a first dose of the vaccine to the most vulnerable segments of the population by the middle of February. If the government achieves that, he said, it could begin to lift restrictions.
Most Britons already face strict curbs on everyday life. Nonessential stores, pubs and restaurants are already closed in much of England, where those living in the areas under the toughest rules are banned from mixing between households.
Now, all parts of England will now be under those curbs and most schools will be closed for most pupils. Some restrictions, however, will be a little less onerous than those imposed last March, when the virus was moving unrelentingly through Europe and the country first locked down.
This time, people in England will still be allowed to meet one other person to exercise together outside, and places of worship will remain open, as will playgrounds. Elite professional soccer matches will continue, although some matches have had to be canceled lately after players were infected.
Medical experts said Johnson had little choice but to impose more draconian measures, given the rapid spread of the new variant. Some said the prime minister was already behind the curve, given how the number of cases and hospital admissions had skyrocketed in the last week.
“He’s already late,” said Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh. “The situation is dire with the new variant. They have to manage borders, pause schools and stop mixing between households.”
The government’s own scientific advisory panel, known as SAGE, recommended on Dec. 22 that Britain consider a national lockdown, as well as closing schools and universities. It said that the variant was on its way to becoming the dominant strain of the coronavirus in many parts of the country.
New infections have surged to a rate of almost 60,000 a day, double the rate of a few weeks ago.
Hospital admissions have doubled in London every week since the beginning of December, Christina Pagel, director of the clinical operational unit at the University College London, wrote on Twitter. With 75,024 deaths, Britain already has the highest death toll in Europe, and medical experts warn that the toll, after growing more modestly over the summer, will begin spiking again.