LONDON – Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed a tough new national lockdown on Monday as the UK’s desperate race to vaccinate its population could be overtaken by a fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus that was on track to overwhelm the country’s beleaguered hospitals .
After several days of alarmingly high and escalating case numbers, Mr Johnson ordered schools and colleges in England to close their doors and switch to distance learning. He appealed to the British to stay home for all but a few necessary purposes, including essential work and the purchase of food and medicine.
The nationwide restrictions, officials warned, will remain in place until at least mid-February.
The decision was a new setback for Mr Johnson as the arrival of two vaccines after nine months and severe criticism of his handling of the pandemic appeared to offer a way out of the crisis.
On the day the first doses of a vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University were given, the good news was drowned out by the reintroduction of the kind of sweeping restrictions put in place last spring when the pandemic first threatened to spiral out of control.
In the past few weeks, the new, highly transmissible variant of the virus has caught on in London and the south-east of England, causing the number of cases to rise alarmingly to nearly 60,000 a day and putting hospitals under acute pressure.
On Sunday, Mr Johnson admitted that current controls of daily living were inadequate. However, the first announcement of a full lockdown came not from England but from Scotland, where the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has consistently moved further and faster to tame the pandemic.
In Edinburgh, Ms Sturgeon said that mainland Scotland people must be required to stay at home and work from wherever possible, while places of worship would be closed and schools were largely operated by distance learning.
Mr Johnson followed on Monday evening to announce the lockdown in England that many predicted.
“It is clear that we must do more together to get this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out,” Johnson said in a televised address.
While the coming weeks may be some of the toughest, he believed Britain “is entering the final phase of the struggle because with every push that goes into our arms we tilt the odds against Covid and in favor of the British people. ”
The people of England have been encouraged to comply with the new rules immediately, although some of the new restrictions won’t take effect until Wednesday morning and a vote in Parliament will likely take place, specifically recalled on the same day.
Ministers had celebrated the deployment of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is not only cheaper than Pfizer-BioNTech’s but also much easier to store. They said it could help turn the tide in Britain’s fight against the virus.
However, the UK is in a race to roll out its mass vaccination program before its overloaded health service is overwhelmed by the new variant. Covid-free treatment is already being postponed again, and pictures of ambulances piling up in some hospitals’ parking lots last week highlighted the challenge facing the country’s tired health workers.
Updated
Jan. 6, 2021, 3:48 p.m. ET
The government has raised its Covid warning for the first time and warns of a “material risk that health services will be overwhelmed”. There were more than 26,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals as of Monday, up 30 percent from the previous week, Johnson’s office said. And cases are increasing rapidly across the country, it said.
Mr Johnson has set an ambitious goal for the country’s vaccine campaign: to have a first dose of the vaccine to the most vulnerable populations by mid-February. If the government does this, the restrictions could be lifted.
Most Britons are already exposed to severe restrictions in everyday life. Non-essential shops, pubs and restaurants are already closed in much of England, where those who live by the strictest rules in the areas are not allowed to mix between households.
Now all parts of England will be under these curbs and schools will be closed to most students.
However, some restrictions will be a little less onerous than those imposed last March when the virus marched relentlessly across Europe and the country was first put into lockdown.
This time around, people in England are still allowed to meet someone else to exercise together outside, and the places of worship remain open, as are the playgrounds. Elite professional football games continue, although some games had to be canceled recently after players became infected.
For critics, developments on Monday showed Mr Johnson’s tendency to postpone decisions until the last moment, in part to balance public health issues with concerns of many of his ruling Conservative Party about the devastating economic impact.
On Sunday, after Mr Johnson used a BBC interview to warn that new restrictions were likely, opposition Labor Party leader Keir Starmer called for immediate new national restrictions.
But on Monday morning, Mr Johnson initially appeared to be resisting being forced to take a quick decision, insisting that the government still measure the impact of the toughest restrictions already in place on a hospital visit. He acknowledged that “tough” weeks were ahead and said there was “no question” that tougher measures would be announced “in due course”.
Even within his own Conservative Party, pressure mounted when a senior lawmaker and former health minister, Jeremy Hunt, wrote on Twitter that it was “time to act” and “schools, close borders and immediately ban any confusion. ”
The main lesson from dealing with the pandemic was that “Countries that act early and act decisively save lives and quickly get their economies back to normal,” Hunt said.
Medical experts said that given the rapid spread of the new variant, Mr Johnson had no choice but to take more draconian measures. Some said the prime minister was already behind the curve given the number of cases and hospital admissions skyrocketed over the past week.
“He’s running late,” said Devi Sridhar, director of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh. “The situation is bad with the new variant. You have to manage boundaries, pause schools, and stop mixing between households. “
The government’s scientific advisory body known as SAGE recommended on December 22nd that the UK consider a national lockdown and close schools and universities. The variant is on the way to become dominant in many parts of the country.
New infections have risen to almost 60,000 per day, twice as many as a few weeks ago.
Hospital admissions in London have doubled every week since early December, wrote Christina Pagel, director of clinical operations at University College London, on Twitter. The UK already has the highest death toll in Europe, with 75,024 deaths, and medical experts are warning that it will rise again after more modest growth in the summer.
Others expressed concern about the constant changes in the message of a government that often seemed to respond to fast-moving events rather than anticipating them.
After the national lockdown last year, the government promised to do everything possible to keep schools open. However, the return of students on Monday after the winter break was confusing as some schools had to close in areas with high infections while some school principals decided to do it themselves. In some cases it was because too many employees were sick, in others it was reports that children might be more susceptible to the new variant than to the original virus.
A teachers’ union called on all elementary schools to switch to distance learning in the first two weeks of January, with the exception of classes aimed at vulnerable children and the families of key workers.
After days of chaos over school policy, Mr Johnson reluctantly and belatedly agreed to the proposal on Monday.
“Parents whose children were in school today reasonably wonder why we didn’t make that decision sooner,” he said, adding, “the answer is simply that we have done everything in our power to make schools keep open. “
