Britain’s ‘Freedom Day’ will come on July 19, says Boris
For me, July 19 is not only the end of the line but the start of an exciting new journey for our country, new health minister tells parliament; Australia batles flare-ups; Italy drops its masks; Turkey halts flights from six countries
Britain will lit most of its remaining COVID-19 restrictions on July 19 in what has been dubbed “Freedom Day,” the government said on Monday despite fears that an increase in coronavirus cases could lead to more deaths.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose government is again under fire ater the resignation of his health minister Mat Hancock for breaking the restrictions by kissing his aide, had hoped to unlock Britain’s economy last week.
But with coronavirus cases rising, driven largely by the more transmissible Delta variant, the government postponed the date until July 19 amid criticism from many businesses which want lockdown to end to try to recoup their losses.
“With every day that goes by it’s clearer to me and all our scientific advisers that we’re very likely to be in a position on July 19 to say that really is the terminus and we can go back to life as it was before COVID as far as possible,” Johnson told reporters.
Hancock’s replacement, Sajid Javid, confirmed the decision in parliament, saying he had spent his first day in the job studying the data to see if the next stage of easing restrictions, called step four, could go ahead any earlier.
“Whilst we decided not to bring forward step four, we see no reason to go beyond the 19th of July,” he told parliament, urging the public to stick to the restrictions for now.
“July 19th remains our target date. The prime minister has called it our terminus date. For me, the 19th of July is not only the end of the line but the start of a exciting new journey for our country.”
Britain, which has one of the highest official death tolls from COVID, is seeing case numbers rise again, with daily increases topping 10,000 in recent days. But officials say a mass vaccination campaign is weakening the link between cases and deaths.
Some officials fear the public may start breaking the rules ater the Sun newspaper published images of Hancock kissing and embracing an aide in his office at a time when it was against the rules for people to hug anyone outside their household.
On Monday, another three virus-related deaths were reported, taking the UK’S total to 128,103.
Throughout the pandemic, death figures on Monday have traditionally been lower because of weekend reporting lags.
Still, many virus experts and National Health Service officials urged the government not to speed up the timetable, saying they need time to vaccinate as many people as possible amid the rapid spread of the highly infectious delta variant, first discovered in India.
“It’s so important that we get the vaccination rates as high as we can before there’s any consideration of easing the current restrictions, which are not really holding the outbreak,” Peter Openshaw, a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, told Sky News.
Infections appear in cities across Australia, with Brisbane, Darwin, Perth and Sydney all reporting new cases of the highly infectious Delta variant, prompting local authorities to impose restrictions.
All of Italy becomes a mask-free, “low-risk” zone for the virus, marking a dramatic milestone for the first European country to be hit by the global pandemic in February 2020.
Turkey has halted flights and all direct travel from Bangladesh, Brazil, South Africa, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka due to new variants of the coronavirus, the Interior Ministry said on Monday.
Those who arrive from other places but have been in the countries listed within the last 14 days will need to show a negative PCR test within a maximum of 72 hours before entry and they will need to quarantine for 14 days, it said.
Those arriving from Pakistan and Afghanistan or who have been there in the last 14 days will need to quarantine in Turkey for 10 days upon arrival, it said.
A scaled-back version of the world’s biggest mobile telecommunications fair got underway Monday in Spain under tight virus controls, with top firms avoiding an in-person presence ater the pandemic derailed last year’s edition.
Spain’s King Felipe V and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez were on hand for the opening of the four-day Mobile World Congress ( MWC) in Barcelona, one of the first big technology conferences staged in Europe since the start of the pandemic.