Johnson’s announcement came on the day that the rollout of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine started in the UK. The government has ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine—enough to potentially inoculate the whole country.
“With most of the country under extreme measures, it’s clear we need to do more together to bring it under control while our vaccines are rolled out,” Johnson told the nation in a televised address on Jan. 4. “In England, we must therefore go into a national lockdown which is tough enough to contain this variant.”
“That means the government is, once again, instructing you to stay at home,” Johnson said.
“You may only leave home for limited reasons permitted, such as to shop for essentials, to work if you absolutely cannot work from home, to exercise, to seek medical assistance, or to escape domestic abuse.”
Parliament will vote remotely on the measures, which come into force on Wednesday.
Primary and secondary schools, as well as colleges, will also be closed from tonight, education will be moved online, and summer GCSE and A-Level exams will now be cancelled.
The prime minister emphasised that the virus was not dangerous to children, but said that the concern was children could be acting as vectors of transmission.
He said that schools might be able to re-open after the February half-term if the virus levels had dropped.
‘One Huge Difference’
Johnson noted that there was “one huge difference” compared to previous lockdowns: the UK “rolling out the biggest vaccination programme in its history.”He said that the UK had so far “vaccinated more people than in the rest of Europe combined.”
Johnson said that by mid-February, he expected that the vaccine would have been offered to everyone in the top priority groups, which include, residents in care for older adults and their carers, everyone over the age of 70, frontline health and social care workers, and all those who are clinically extremely vulnerable.
England was put into a national lockdown in November, before a local four-tier system was used to try to curb the spread of the virus.
Just hours earlier, Scotland’s first minister had announced a national lockdown.
Hospitalizations due to the virus are up 20 percent in the last weekly average.
In the southeast corner of England, where the new variant is dominant, levels of infections are much higher.
Data shows that over 95 percent of people who died with the CCP virus in England were recorded as having an underlying health condition.
However, that data uses a very broad definition of “underlying health condition” required by the healthcare recording system, which potentially includes many minor ailments, and could thus encompass much of the population.
