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Faced with negative reactions from the governments of the three autonomous regions (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and criticism from doctors and experts, Downing Street explains that the change in formula, announced by the government in the afternoon and confirmed this afternoon by Boris Johnson In a televised speech to the nation, essentially nothing changes: “Being on guard means staying home as long as possible and respecting precautions about social estrangement if forced to leave,” says a spokesman.
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The dominant opinion is that there is indeed a change of line, it causes uncertainty about the behavior that the population will have to endure and it runs the risk of triggering a second peak of infection.
The impression is that the prime minister wanted to give good news, boost the nation’s morale and point out that the sacrifices imposed by the closure of activities and by the prohibition of movement are beginning to pay off. The risk is that this desire, dictated more by politics than science, will contribute to further confusion.
Johnson speaks to the country at 7:00 p.m. local time, with a speech televised by the BBC. To begin with, the Prime Minister commends the population for having implemented measures “unprecedented” in British history, avoiding a “catastrophe” even worse than the one in progress. The conservative leader therefore announces the creation of a Covid alert system, an alert system similar to the one that already exists for the terrorist threat, divided into five levels: level 5, the highest, is “the situation we would have had if the NHS (the public health system, ed) had been crushed “by the pandemic.
During the blockade, the UK is at level 4, the second-worst, and “thanks to your sacrifices, we are now in a position to gradually move towards level 3”.
The first step in this direction, Johnson continues, is a “change in attitude that we hope will be adopted” from the week beginning tomorrow: “We said you should work from home if you can, and go to work alone if you really have to. Now we say that anyone who cannot work from home, for example people in the construction or manufacturing sector, should be encouraged to go to work “
But the prime minister asks to avoid public transport “if possible”, to maintain social distance, then go by car, bicycle or on foot: it is not easy in a huge metropolis like London, where they used 5 million passengers per day. The subway and buses before the coronavirus led to the shutdown.
Other news: You can leave your home to play sports, alone or with a family member, not just once a day but “out of time”. You can go “sunbathing in the parks”, as many have already done in recent days, in violation of the rules, without resisting the temptation of particularly high temperatures for these latitudes.
Other steps, if all goes well: On June 1 they could “reopen stores” and “elementary schools”; on July 1, it will be able to reopen “part of the hotel industry”, that is, pubs and restaurants, “as long as they maintain safety and social distance”. Finally, without a date when this provision would go into effect, a “quarantine” (of two weeks) will be imposed “on anyone entering the United Kingdom by plane”: a measure already leaked and highly controversial by airlines, kneeling for a blockade that has reduced the number of flights by 95 percent and now fears going completely to the ground to make such a decision, which the police admit they cannot control.
Boris Johnson repeats that the blockade continues but only begins to loosen, warning that this Phase 2 step by step is conditioned by the continuous decrease in infections (3923 yesterday) and the number of victims (268 in the last 24 hours). The prime minister’s intention is clear: to restart the economy little by little, so that the damage to human life caused by the coronavirus does not add to the damage of an even more serious recession that will be managed in the long term.
But the Labor opposition and the leaders of the autonomous regions, at the head of the entire Scottish Prime Minister Nicola’s sturgeon (who says: “we continue to ask people to stay at home, not simply to be on guard”), they fear that the change of course is another false move by a government that has minimized the virus, he proposed immunity from the flock to later retrieve it, was unable to provide adequate protection to hospital staff and is now sending an opaque, difficult to understand message.
The conservative government is also challenging a new statistic from the World Health Organization, which shows that the United Kingdom is not only the country with the most victims in Europe, but is now the country with the highest coronavirus mortality in the world: 6.6 deaths per million inhabitants, followed by Sweden with 6.2, by the United States with 5.1 by Italy and Spain with 4.7.
France is seventh in this ranking with 3.5, Germany ninth with 1.7. The country that invented public health after the war is the backlight in the battle against the coronavirus. It is only a matter of time before a commission of inquiry investigates those responsible for this result.
