British and Scottish Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Nicolas Surgeon on Monday announced very strict measures to stem the uncontrolled tide of Covid-19.
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The British are brooding at the start of 2021. And for good reason: it looks terribly like March 2020, when the coronavirus epidemic, for the first time, overwhelmed the United Kingdom. United. Monday January 4, the day when the first injections of the vaccine co-developed by the University of Oxford and the company AstraZeneca began, Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish Prime Minister, decided the general reconfinement of Scotland, effective the next day morning, with schools closed for a month. A few hours later, Boris Johnson followed it by announcing the same type of radical measures on the scale of the 56 million inhabitants of England. Northern Ireland could follow as Wales announced the closure of schools until January 18.
The tone serious, the British Prime Minister therefore confirmed a generalized and national reconfinement, from Tuesday, January 5, the country facing a “critical moment”, due to a variant of the virus that appeared in the autumn in Kent (South-East of the country), “between 50% and 70% more contagious” , estimated the leader. Non-essential stores will be closing all over England. Just like primary schools, colleges and high schools, which will be closed until mid-February. “Children are very unlikely to get seriously ill, including from the mutant virus,” Johnson said, but the virus spreads even faster in their age groups.
Sports outdoors will be prohibited, except competitions (the Premier League football is preserved). People will only be able to leave their homes for runs or physical exercise and with a maximum of one other person. The only difference compared to the confinement of March 2020: daycare centers and the first years of kindergarten will remain open. As for the final exams, “they will not be able to be held as planned” warned Mr. Johnson. “The coming weeks will be the hardest we have known but we are entering the last phase of this pandemic,” the leader concluded.
Escalation of the epidemic situation
Libertarian at heart, like many British conservatives, Mr Johnson resisted, while SAGE, the scientific council advising the government had recommended the closure of schools in mid-December. 10 Downing Street wanted to keep them open as long as possible, after three months of forced closure in the spring of 2020, so as not to further mortgage the children’s future. But this extremely difficult decision had become inevitable in view of the epidemic situation, which has completely taken off since Christmas. Moreover, dozens of heads of establishments and municipalities took the lead all over the country on Monday, by not reopening schools following the end of the school holidays.
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