Britain scrambles to avoid a second virus lockdown
LLONDON » ocal shutdowns are creeping across England. A vaunted testing system is on the verge of collapse. And Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain is contemplating temporary closures of restaurants and pubs to corral a second surge of the coronavirus that threatens to land Europe’s worst- affected country in the same predicament it faced this spring.
For Britons, the sinking realization that the government may have fiddled away a summer’s worth of gains against the coronavirus has brought fresh worries about jobs and rising anger at Johnson’s contradictory edicts.
In hard- hit northeast England, new rules banned people frommeeting almost everyone — even relatives — from other households and forced restaurants and pubs to close at 10 p. m. In all, about 10 million people, most of them in central and northern England, are now subject to heightened local restrictions intended to suppress the virus before a stricter lockdown becomes necessary.
Johnny Harrison, an artist based in Newcastle, in northeast England, described the new controls as another “kick in the teeth” after months of national lockdown gave way to a gradual reopening this summer.
He added, “What’s more worrying is, will there be a national lockdown, and will this take us right into next year?”
Scientists, including those advising the government, are divided on that question. But many worried that the two- week period of restaurant and pub closures now under consideration — a sort of “circuitbreak,” in the words of government advisers — would not be enough to contain a virus that is now estimated to be doubling in Britain as quickly as every seven days.
Johnson acknowledged Friday that he was considering stricter measures and spoke bluntly about the second wave of the virus now advancing across Britain.
“There’s no question, as I’ve said for several weeks now, that we could expect and we are now seeing a second wave coming in,” he said in a television interview. “I don’t think anybody wants to go into a second lockdown, but clearly when you look at what is happening, you’ve got to wonder whether we need to go further than the rule of six that we brought in on Monday.” He was referring to a new law forbidding social gatherings of more than six people.
The government, adamant only weeks ago that people patronize pubs and restaurants, is now considering pleading with people to do the opposite. Over the summer, Johnson even offered people a government- subsidized discount to eat at restaurants and pubs through a program called Eat Out to Help Out.
“It does seem ironic,” said Jonathan Ball, a professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham, “that after encouraging mass attendance at pubs, cafes and restaurants through Eat Out to Help Out that we are now contemplating restricting or closing those activities down.”
The latest signs of the virus’ resurgent march through Britain left the government little choice. The R number, a measure of how many people on average a single patient will infect, is at 1.1 to 1.4, the government said Friday, meaning that on average every 10 people infected will spread the virus to 11 to 14 other people. Any number greater than 1 is a worrisome indication that the epidemic is growing.
In the week ending Sept. 10, there were about 6,000 new cases of the coronavirus every day outside hospitals and nursing homes in England, the government’s official statistics authority estimated, nearly a doubling of new infections from the week before. The government reported 4,322 new confirmed cases Friday, the highest since early May.
The U. K. recorded 27 deaths Friday, bringing the government’s official tally of deaths from COVID- 19 to 41,732.
“We need to learn the lessons of the spring,” Susan Michie, director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at University College London and a member of a government advisory group, said on Twitter. Every day’s delay in implementing “measures to restrict transmission when it is increasing exponentially will be expensive in terms of health and lives in the short term and the economy in the long term.”