UK disease experts back pre-Christmas Covid lockdown

The UK Cabinet is meeting on Saturday and a new national lockdown could be days away

A man walks past a closed shop in Nottingham as the English city entered the highest level of lockdown on Friday. Bloomberg

Two scientists advising the UK government on its coronavirus action plan have publicly supported a new national lockdown.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering imposing the measures from next week and called a meeting of his Cabinet on Saturday.

Professor John Edmunds, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, said Christmas, when families and friends could be tempted to socialise and break lockdown orders, can be made relatively safe if strict restrictions were imposed now.

Another Sage adviser, Professor Calum Semple, said “the tiered approach to restrictions hasn’t worked particularly well”.

“If [a four-week lockdown] was applied nationally and was adhered to you would see a dramatic fall in hospital admissions and that’s in four weeks’ time,” Prof Semple said.

He suggested a review at four weeks and said there could be a “bit of easing around the festive activities” but that a lockdown would give officials “time to get test, trace and isolate processes really up to scratch”.

They both seemed to support a national lockdown rather than local lockdowns or a limited national circuit breaker.

“The idea of a lockdown is to save lives primarily,” Prof Edmunds said.

“I think the only real way that we have a relatively safe Christmas is to get the incidence right down because otherwise I think Christmas is very difficult for people – nobody wants to have a disrupted Christmas holiday period where you can’t see your family and so on.

“So I think the only way that that can be safely achieved is to bring the incidence right down, and in order to do that we have to take action now and that action needs to be stringent, unfortunately.”

If Mr Johnson’s government does decide on a second lockdown it could happen as early as next week.

The UK on Friday reported 24,405 new cases of Covid-19 and a further 274 deaths within 28 days of a positive test, according to government data.

The Times said Mr Johnson was expected to hold a news conference on Monday to announce the new measures, under which everything could be closed except essential shops and educational settings.

Mr Johnson has repeatedly said he did not want to impose a second national lockdown because of the harm it will do to the economy.

France, similarly, was adamant there would be no second lockdown, but President Emmanuel Macron made an about-turn in the face of soaring infection rates.

In England, each region is placed in one of three tiers with Tier 1 being medium, Tier 2 high and Tier 3 very high.
But so far, regional restrictions have not slowed the spreading second wave.