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England will enter a second national lockdown starting Thursday, Boris Johnson announced, as a second wave of coronavirus cases continues to grow.
In a speech on Saturday, the prime minister detailed new rules that will be in effect from November 5 to December 2.
Here’s that full speech:
Thank you very much Patrick and Chris. I am afraid that no responsible PM can ignore the message of those figures.
When I told you two weeks ago that we were following a local and regional approach to combat this virus, I believed then and still passionately believe that it was the right thing to do.
Because we know the cost of these restrictions, the damage they cause, the impact on employment and livelihoods, and on people’s mental health.
Nobody wants to impose these kinds of measures anywhere.
We did not want to close businesses, pubs and restaurants in one part of the country, where the incidence was very low, when the vast majority of infections occurred in other places.
Our hope was that through strong local action, strong local leadership, we could reduce infection rates where the disease was increasing and tackle the problem in that way across the country.
And I want to thank the millions of people who have been enduring these restrictions in their areas for so long. I want to thank the local leaders who have stepped up and the local communities.
Because, as you can see from some of those graphs, the R has stayed lower than it would have been otherwise, and there are signs that your work has paid off.
And we will continue to take a pragmatic and local approach as much as possible in the months to come.
But as we have also seen in those charts, we have to be humble before nature.
And in this country, unfortunately, as in much of Europe, the virus is spreading even faster than in the worst case reasonable from our scientific advisers.
Whose models, as you’ve just seen now, suggest that unless we act, we could see deaths in this country at several thousand a day.
A mortality spike, sadly much higher than the one we saw in April
Even in the Southwest, where the incidence was so low, and still is so low, it is now clear that current projections mean that they will run out of hospital capacity in a matter of weeks unless we act.
And let me explain why the invasion of the NHS would be a medical and moral disaster beyond the stark loss of life.
Because the huge exponential growth in the number of patients, by no means all of them elderly, by the way, would mean that doctors and nurses would be forced to choose which patients to treat.
Who would get oxygen and who would not?
Who would live and who would die
And doctors and nurses would be forced to choose between saving covid and non-covid patients
And the sheer weight of the covid lawsuit would mean depriving tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of non-covid patients of the care they need.
It is crucial to understand this that the general threat to public health does not come from focusing too much on covid, but from not focusing enough, from not being able to control it.
And if we let the lines on those charts grow the way they could and the way they are projected to grow, then the risk is that, for the first time in our lives, the NHS will not be there for us and for us. families
And even if I could now double the capacity overnight, and obviously I’m proud that we’ve increased the capacity tremendously, we have the nightingales, we have 13,000 more nurses now than last year, we have a lot more doctors, but it would still be it won’t be enough, because the virus is duplicating faster than we could possibly add capacity
So now is the time to act because there is no alternative.
From Thursday to early December, you must stay home.
You can only leave home for specific reasons, including:
For education; To work, say if you cannot work from home; To exercise and recreation outdoors, with your home or just with a person from another home; For medical reasons, appointments, and to escape injury or damage; To buy food and basic products; And to provide care for vulnerable people, or as a volunteer.
I am afraid that non-essential stores, entertainment venues will be closed, although click-and-collect services may continue and essential stores will remain open, so there is no need to stock up.
Pubs, bars and restaurants must close except for take-out and delivery services.
Workplaces should remain open where people cannot work from home, for example in construction or manufacturing.
Single adult households can still form exclusive support bubbles with another household, and children will still be able to move between households if their parents are separated.
If you are clinically vulnerable, or are over 60 years old, you should take extra care to follow the rules and minimize your contacts with others.
I know how tough the shielding was and we won’t ask people to protect themselves in the same way again. However, we ask those who are clinically extremely vulnerable to minimize their contact with others and not go to work if they cannot work from home.
I have no illusions about how difficult this will be for companies that have already had to endure hardships this year. I really am very sorry.
That is why we are also extending the licensing system until November. The licensing plan was a success in the spring. He supported people and companies at a critical time. We won’t finish it. We will extend it until December.
There will be some differences compared to March.
These measures, above all, will have a limited duration, starting next Thursday, November 5. They will end on Wednesday, December 2, when we will seek to ease the restrictions, returning to the tiered system at the local and regional level according to the latest data and trends.
Christmas is going to be different this year, very different, but I have the sincerest hope and believe that by taking strong action now, we can allow families across the country to be together.
My priority, our priority, is still keeping people in education, so childcare, early childhood education centers, schools, colleges and universities will remain open. Our experienced physicians continue to advise that school is the best place for children.
We cannot allow this virus to harm our children’s future even more than it already has. I urge parents to continue taking their children to school and I am very grateful to teachers across the country for their dedication to keeping schools open.
And it is vital that we maintain provision for non-Covid healthcare groups.
So please, this is very important, unless your doctors tell you otherwise, you should continue to use the NHS, get your scans, keep your appointments and pick up your treatments. If possible, we want you to continue to access these services, now and through the winter. In fact, only by taking this step can we protect the NHS for you.
On Monday I will present our plans to Parliament. On Wednesday, parliament will debate and vote on these measures which, if approved, will come into force, as I say, on Thursday.
We have updated delegated administrations on the action we are taking in England and are ready to work with them on plans for Christmas and beyond.
We must remember that we are not alone in what we are going through. Our friends in Belgium, France and Germany have had to take very similar measures.
So now that we come together to fight this second wave, I want to say something about the way forward.
Because people will reasonably ask when this will all end
And like I’ve said before, I’m optimistic that this will feel a lot different and better for the spring.
It’s not just that we have ever-better drugs and therapies, and the realistic hope of a vaccine in the first trimester of next year.
We now have the immediate prospect of using many millions of cheap, reliable, and above all fast response tests.
Tests you can use yourself to find out if it is infectious or not and get the result in 10 to 15 minutes.
And we know from trials across the country in schools and hospitals that we can use these tests not only to locate infectious people, but to reduce disease.
So over the next few days and weeks, we plan a steady but massive expansion in the implementation of these rapid response tests.
Apply them in an increasing number of situations.
From helping women have their partners with them in the delivery rooms when they are giving birth to trying entire towns and even entire cities
The military has been hired to work on logistics and the program will start in a matter of days.
Work with local communities, local government, public health directors, and organizations of all kinds to help people discover whether or not they are infectious, and then immediately get them to isolate themselves and stop the spread
And I can tell you tonight that scientists may be unanimously pessimistic about the immediate options.
But they are unanimously optimistic about the future in the medium and long term
We will get through this, but we must act now to contain this fall surge.
We will not return to the large-scale lockdown of March and April
It is less prohibitive and less restrictive.
But as of Thursday the basic message is the same
Stay at home. Protect the NHS. And save lives.
