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After over 13,500 deaths, 1 lakh cases, UK extends Covid-19 lockdown
Foreign secretary Dominic Raab announced the extension amidst signs that the curbs are having some effect. Ministers and experts said lifting the lockdown or a return to normalcy would not be feasible until the mass availability of a vaccine for the virus.
As the death toll from coronavirus rose to 13,729 on Thursday, the Boris Johnson government extended the lockdown by at least three more weeks in the hope that social distancing and other restrictions will continue to have impact.
Official figures show the number of people who tested positive for the virus rose to 103,093.
Foreign secretary Dominic Raab announced the extension amidst signs that the curbs are having some effect. Ministers and experts said lifting the lockdown or a return to normalcy would not be feasible until the mass availability of a vaccine for the virus.
Several projects across the globe are at various stages of developing a vaccine for coronavirus, with one in the University of Oxford promising that it could be available by September. Usually a vaccine is available for mass inoculation in 12 to 18 months.
Raab said: “Now is not the moment to give the coronavirus a second chance…We still don’t have infection rates down as much as we need to. Any change to social distancing measures now would risk significant increase in infections.”
According to health minister Nadine Dorries, “There is only one way we can ‘exit’ full lockdown and that is when we have a vaccine. Until then, we need to find ways we can adapt society and strike a balance between the health of the nation and our economy”.
Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson of Imperial College advising the government said some level of social distancing would need to be retained, until a vaccine is available, calling for a single-minded emphasis on scaling up testing and contact tracing.
Ferguson called for more action at the official level, noting that more preparation had been done for Brexit, including a separate department, than to deal with the pandemic.
Ferguson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “There’s a lot of discussion. I would like to see action accelerated. I don’t have a deep insight about what’s going on in government, but decisions need to be accelerated. We need to put in place an infrastructure, a command and control structure, a novel organisation”.
“I’m reminded we had a department for Brexit for government. That was a major national emergency and we are faced with something even larger than Brexit. And yet I don’t quite see the evidence for that level of organisation. I’d like to see measures accelerated.”
He argued that a huge infrastructure of testing and contact tracing would need to be in place in order for the lockdown to be lifted without further peaks, pointing to the model of South Korea, which has been suppressing new outbreaks.
