Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday indicated that tougher measures are likely to be imposed to curb the continuing rise in Covid-19 infections as the first of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines are due to be administered across the UK from Monday.
Latest figures show there were 57,725 new cases by Saturday evening – more than 11 times the peak in April-May – and 445 deaths in 24 hours, with 23,823 patients stricken by the virus in hospital, 1,847 of them on ventilators.
Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Johnson defended his government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, but added that region-wise restrictions in England are “probably about to get tougher”. The government, he said, had a “range of measures” to consider.
“It may be that we need to do things in the next few weeks that will be tougher in many parts of the country; I’m fully, fully reconciled to that,” he said, insisting that he remained confident that things would be better later in the year.
“The government has taken every possible step that we reasonably could. What we couldn’t have foreseen I think reasonably was the arrival of a new variant of the (coronavirus) spreading between 50% and 70% faster… Once we did understand that, we took… decisive action.”
England currently has a four-tier alert system in which cities and regions are placed according to the prevalence of the virus.
As of Saturday, there are none in the lowest Tiers 1 and 2 with the least restrictions, but millions in the top Tier 3 and 4. A new Tier 5 may be put in place to deal with the challenge of the variant.
Nearly 1 million people have so far received the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. Johnson couldn’t give details of the mass vaccination programme, but said, “We do hope that we’ll be able to do tens of millions in the course of the next three months.”
Former UK PM Tony Blair called for the introduction of “vaccination stations” modelled on polling stations and adoption of a single platform for a “Covid pass” that would allow individuals to show their status on testing and whether they have been vaccinated.
He said, “Though it is true that the National Health Service (NHS) is doing a herculean effort in vaccinating as many as they have, it is simply not sufficient. We have to treble at least the number of vaccinations by the end of January when enough supplies of the vaccine should be available to allow us to do that.”