Boris Johnson is expected to announce the implementation of tighter “Plan B” social restrictions imminently in response to a surge in infections with the omicron variant of Covid-19.
Such a step would mean the return of working from home orders as well as the introduction of vaccine passes for crowded venues such as nightclubs, measures intended to prevent the NHS being once more overrun with coronavirus cases this winter.
The total number of UK omicron cases so far stood at 437 as of Wednesday morning, after 101 more were reported on Tuesday, while the UK recorded its highest number of weekly cases since January on Monday and a further 45,691 on Tuesday plus 180 deaths.
Senior Whitehall sources said that a meeting of the government’s Covid-O committee has been called to discuss the restrictions while Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said that a new UK-wide lockdown to deal with the threat of omicron could no longer be ruled out despite Britain’s high rate of vaccination.
In a press conference on Saturday 27 November responding to the identification of the new omicron variant, the prime minister had already announced that face masks would once more be mandatory in shops and on public transport, more countries would be added to the travel “red list” and new arrivals from overseas would be required to take a PCR test and potentially self-isolate for 10 days.
However, he stopped short at that point of fully implementing the “Plan B” contingency strategy drawn up in September – which, in addition to face masks, meant working from home where possible and vaccine passports in exchange for entry to crowded venues – keen not to risk public ire and doing further damage to the economy with Christmas on the horizon and the festive shopping season underway.
Introducing the reserve strategy to the House of Commons in the autumn, health secretary Sajid Javid had said that although the need to implement such measures was “not an outcome anyone wants, it’s one that we need to be ready for just in case”.
The government subsequently preferred to pursue its “Plan A” of promoting vaccine booster jabs to adults who had already had their first two shots but might now be beginning to experience waning immunity levels.
However, it appears that approach has now run its course and more severe restrictions are needed to stop the rampant spread of omicron.
Cases of the new variant are now “doubling every two to three days”, according to Professor Ferguson, who told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s likely to overtake delta before Christmas at this rate, precisely when is hard to say.”
“We’ll start seeing an impact on overall case numbers – it’s still probably only 2 per cent, 3 per cent of all cases so it’s kind of swamped, but within a week or two we’ll start seeing overall case numbers accelerate quite markedly as well,” he added.
Sage had long anticipated the need for stronger “rapid deployment” preventative measures in the event that coronavirus cases began to surge once more as the long nights closed in.
In meeting minutes published on 22 October, its experts said that advice to work from home is “likely to have the greatest individual impact” in cutting infections, with the NHS Confederation at the same time calling for the Plan B measures drawn up in September to be implemented.
Matthew Taylor, the healthcare body’s CEO, said the threat to the NHS was already severe, given that British hospitals are already facing a backlog of 5 million treatments, postponed to cope with the earlier waves of coronavirus infections, declaring: “We are right on the edge… It would require an incredible amount of luck for us not to find ourselves in the midst of a profound crisis over the next three months.”
But Mr Johnson’s government has continually resisted calls for a return to masks and social distancing, having loudly trumped its 19 July easing as “Freedom Day”, repeatedly insisting instead that it had “absolutely no plan” to address the high infection rate – which has held stable at around the 40,000-per-day mark for months – and was keeping a “very close eye” on the data.
Now the picture appears to have changed dramatically and those finely judged calculations simply no longer add up.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
