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The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, announced this Monday that he has decreed a new national confinement in England, which includes the closure of schools, due to the alarming expansion of the coronavirus caused by the new variant.
“Hospitals are under more pressure than at any time since the beginning of the pandemic,” Johnson said in an address to the nation, urging all citizens not to leave their homes except for some essential reason.
Citizens are called to follow the new instructions from now on, although the law to regulate this new confinement will not be approved until Wednesday in the morning in Parliament.
Johnson called for caution about the length of the measure, but said he hopes to gradually lift the lockdown and reopen schools after the school holidays in mid-February “if our knowledge of the virus does not change, if vaccination continues to be successful, if deaths they start to go down and if everyone plays their role by following the rules. “
Also by mid-February he expects the first dose of the vaccine has been administered to the four priority groups in the immunization campaign: residents and nursing home workers, over 80 years, workers of the public health service (NHS) and the population with pre-existing diseases.
Johnson remarked that the new variant – between 50 and 70 percent more contagious – it is spreading “in a frustrating and alarming way.”
To illustrate the situation, he revealed that the number of currently hospitalized by covid is “40 percent higher than at the peak of the first wave” in April.
Dating only “for limited reasons”
Among the guidelines that are part of the new lockdown, Johnson urged citizens to stay in their homes and only leave their homes “for limited reasons”.
Among them, to “buy essential products, seek medical help -such as requesting a Covid-19 test-, work if absolutely necessary, exercise or escape from situations of domestic abuse.
As for schools and universities, these centers will operate remotely from tomorrow until mid-February, although childcare services, such as nurseries, will remain operational.
Johnson also highlighted as a “great difference” between this new confinement and the previous one the fact that the country is now in the “in the UK’s largest vaccination campaign in history”, following the introduction today of the compound developed by the University of Oxford and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which joins the Pfizer / BioNTech preparation.
More than 58 thousand new infected with Covid-19
The country’s main medical advisers today recommended raising the alert level – from 4 to 5 – and warned that the public health system “could be overwhelmed in 21 days” unless tougher measures are adopted.
“Without new measures, there is a material risk that in several areas the NHS will be overwhelmed in the next 21 days“they alerted.
“Cases are increasing almost everywhere, in much of the country driven by the new, more transmissible variant of the virus,” they explained.
This measure was taken in the same joranda in which the United Kingdom added 58,784 new infections by Covid-19 , a new record for daily infections, according to data released by the British Ministry of Health.
The ministry reported in addition to other 407 deaths from the disease, This brings the total number of deaths from coronavirus in this country since the beginning of the crisis to 75,431, while 2,713,563 positives have been registered so far.
