Lockdown could last until 31 March, government smallprint reveals
England’s third national lockdown could last until 31 March, according to smallprint in the government’s newly-published Covid regulations.
It comes despite Boris Johnson earlier this week telling the public that restrictions will last until mid-February.
Speaking in an address to the nation from Downing Street on Tuesday, the PM said he had “no choice” but to plunge England into its third national lockdown and place an “invisible shield” around the elderly and vulnerable.
MPs are set to return to Parliament this evening for a vote on the new lockdown, following a debate on the restrictions in the Commons this afternoon. The new measures had originally looked set to pass with overwhelming support from the Conservative party.
But revelations that the lockdown could last much longer than stated ignited a backlash from Tory MPs on a Zoom call with the 1922 Committee of backbenchers last night.
Tory MP Nus Ghani, part of the lockdown-sceptic Covid Recovery Group (CRG), told Times Radio the Prime Minister appeared to be asking MPs to let him enforce a three-month lockdown on the nation.
Speaking in the Commons this morning, Johnson said England’s “emergence from the cocoon will not be a big bang, but a gradual unravelling”.
“Not because we expect the full national lockdown to continue until [31 March], but to allow a steady controlled, evidence-led move down through the tiers on a regional basis,” he said, adding that measures will be relaxed “brick-by-brick, breaking free of our confinement but without risking our hard-won gains”.
The Prime Minister added that lockdown restrictions will be reviewed every two weeks from mid-February and removed if deemed unnecessary.
A clear timeline for exiting lockdown is currently “the kernel of the debate”, Johnson said.
If current plans to vaccinate around 13.4m people within seven weeks are successful “then clearly, at that moment, around February 15… there will be substantial opportunities to relax the restrictions we currently face”, he said.
It comes after figures released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics showed that 1 in 50 people in the country are currently infected with coronavirus, with the figure rising to 1 in 30 in London.
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, sparked widespread gloom last night by suggesting some Covid restrictions could be return next winter to help stub out the virus.
“We shouldn’t kid ourselves [that] this just disappears with spring,” he told a Downing Street press conference.
“If we did not do all the things all of us must now do, if people don’t take the stay at home seriously, the risk at this point in time, in the middle of winter, with this new variant, is extraordinarily high.”
The warning came as the UK yesterday recorded more than 60,000 new coronavirus infections for the first time since the start of the pandemic. Yesterday’s Covid-related death toll more than doubled Monday’s figure, after 830 new fatalities were reported.