England could face stringent new national lockdown restrictions within days, according to reports.
Boris Johnson is considering imposing new measures from Wednesday, lasting until December 1, after scientists warned that half a million people were being infected with coronavirus each week.
The Prime Minister is expected to announce the measures for England at a press conference on Monday, The Times reports.
Everything except essential shops and education settings could be closed under the new measures, the paper said, but no final decisions are believed to have been made. Tougher regional measures are also being considered.
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Scientists and Labour have continued to pile on the pressure regarding the introduction of a "circuit-breaker" to curb Covid-19 cases, however Mr Johnson has so far resisted.
All parts of England are on course to eventually end up in Tier 3 restrictions, they believe, while deaths could potentially hit 500 per day within weeks.
Government scientists are also confident that more than 50,000 new cases of coronavirus are now occurring every day in England.
A senior Government scientific adviser said: ”It’s definitely too late to think that the two week circuit-breaker on it own will sort this out. It would bring it down a bit but it wouldn’t be enough to bring (the R value) right down. A two week circuit-breaker would have an effect but now almost certainly it would need to go on for longer to have a significant effect.”
They said the R needs to be brought below one in many places to “get it down to levels that don’t run the risk of breaching health service capacity” while in other regions the growth needs to flatten for that to happen.
They said the “longer you leave it the more difficult it is to turn this around.”
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