Boris Johnson has said England will “ride out the Omicron wave” sweeping the United Kingdom without new restrictions.
Ahead of Nicola Sturgeon’s covid update to the Scottish parliament on Wednesday the Prime Minister said that his approach of lighter ‘plan B” restrictions, with no limits on crowd gathering s or table service and social distancing in pubs, was the right one.
Johnson said his government will continue to “watch what happens very closely”, but noted: “We think that this is the right approach to take. It’s a balanced approach. It has to balance a lot of considerations.”
He said: “It has to balance the effect on people’s lives and livelihoods of lockdowns, which are painful, which take away people’s life chances and which do a great deal of social damage, damage to people’s mental health as well as damage to the economy.
“So it’s a difficult balance to strike. But that is that is where we are.”
Speaking at a Downing Street press conference on Tuesday afternoon, the Prime Minister said claims the pandemic was over are “profoundly wrong” as daily cases climbed to 218,724.
But when asked about the likelihood of restrictions at a Downing Street press briefing, he said: “We will monitor everything very closely – we clearly can’t rule anything out.
“What we are trying to do is take a balanced approach where we rely on people to implement Plan B carefully and to behave carefully with other people – and people are doing that.
“You can tell people are really responding to this and they are doing their absolute best, despite the extreme transmissibility of Omicron. What we’re also doing is massively accelerating the booster rollout and it has gone incredibly fast.
He added: “I think, at the moment, it depends. To be absolutely frank with you, it depends on whether the virus will behave in the way it perhaps has behaved in South Africa, whether it peaks, how quickly it blows through.
“But if you ask me to guess, I would say we have a good chance of getting through the Omicron wave without the need for further restrictions, and without the need certainly for a lockdown.”
At her update tomorrow Nicola Sturgeon is expected to come under further pressure from the Conservative opposition to reduce the isolation period from ten to seven days and to give a timetable for mass events, like the Six Nations international rugby matches and the Celtic Connections music, festival can go ahead.
