Boris Johnson to outline lifting restrictions ‘in next few days’
Ministers will set out details about reopening the nation after months of closure “over the next few days and weeks,” the Prime Minister has announced.
Speaking at a Downing Street press conference, Boris Johnson said ministers are currently drawing up plans about “how we want to get things open again”.
It comes as the UK passed the grim milestone of 100,000 coronavirus deaths today, after recording a further 1,612 Covid-related fatalities in the past 24 hours.
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said the UK should not expect the current daily death rate to come down for “some weeks”. Britain’s average seven-day death rate currently stands at 1,102.
“We will see unfortunately quite a lot more deaths before the vaccines start to take effect,” Whitty added.
He said new coronavirus mutations have accelerated the UK’s death toll in recent months, adding that they changed the situation “substantially”.
The Prime Minister said it was “hard to compute the tragedy” of the 100,000 milestone.
“I think that you’d exhaust the thesaurus of misery. It’s an appalling and tragic loss of life,” said Johnson. “All we can do now is work together with the tolls that we have with the stay at home principle, plus the vaccines, to defeat the virus.”