The Prime Minister has explained the decision for the new tier structure which has left 99% of England in tough restrictions.
The move has put just Cornwall and the Isle of Wight in the lowest tier, with everyone else under Tier Two or Tier Three rules.
Boris Johnson defended the Government’s latest tiered controls for England, saying they were essential to get coronavirus down.
The Prime Minister acknowledged that many people felt “frustrated” – particularly if they were in an area with low infection rates.
Areas such as South Hams in Devon - which has the lowest rate in the country - have been placed into the same middle tier as Liverpool - which was in Tier Three before lockdown.
“I know it is frustrating for people when they are in a high-tier area when there is very little incidence in their village or their area. I totally understand why people feel frustrated,” he said during a visit to a public health laboratory in Wiltshire.
“The difficulty is that if you did it any other way, first of all you’d divide the country up into loads and loads of very complicated sub-divisions – there has got to be some simplicity and clarity in the way we do this.
“The second problem is that, alas, our experience is that when a high-incidence area is quite close to a low-incidence area, unless you beat the problem in the high-incidence area, the low-incidence area I’m afraid starts to catch up.”
Mr Johnson said more mass coronavirus testing is in the pipeline and the supply of quick-result tests is not an issue, with the UK set to make its own within months.
The Prime Minister said: “We’ve got tens of, perhaps hundreds of, millions of lateral flow tests coming into this country. We already have a huge stockpile.
“The difficulty is not the supply at the moment, the difficulty is actually working with local government, local communities to get them doing it.
“Liverpool already showed the way. We’re now looking at Barnsley, Doncaster and other places around the country where they want to pull together and do it.
“Just now, in this lab here in PHE (Public Health England) in Porton Down, I’ve been talking to some scientists – we are seeing real progress on a UK-made lateral flow test.
“We’re now quite there yet but in the months ahead we’ll be making them in this country as well.
“So the supply I don’t think is going to be the problem. The issue is going to be getting everybody mobilised, to understand the potential advantages of mass community testing.”
