LONDON — Boris Johnson announced a national lockdown across England starting next week as the coronavirus outbreak spreads faster than even his U.K. government's worst-case scenario.
The prime minister announced the measures Saturday with Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance and England's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty in London. It comes as the official number of coronavirus cases in the U.K. topped 1 million and more details began to trickle out.
Restaurants and nonessential retail will be closed across England until Dec. 2, ITV's Robert Peston reported, following a meeting of Johnson's Cabinet on Saturday. International travel will be banned except for work purposes. But schools and universities will remain open, marking a key difference with the first national lockdown imposed by Johnson in March.
The move represents a significant — and politically risky — change of plan for Johnson, who has called it the "nuclear" option and repeatedly said his strategy of tackling local virus hot spots is preferable to economically "disastrous" blanket restrictions.
It looks like he may not have a choice, given the surge in infections in the U.K., which announced 326 new coronavirus deaths on Saturday. The country has Europe's highest death toll from COVID-19 with more than 46,000 fatalities. The policy to fight COVID-19 is controlled separately in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Members of his own Conservative Party are strongly against the move, and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab as recently as Friday morning said it would be "desperately unfair" to impose national measures when COVID-19 rates vary so much across England.
A volte-face also risks vindicating opposition Labor Party Leader Keir Starmer's calls for a "circuit-breaker" lockdown to reduce transmission.
The timing is also not ideal. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak's flagship wage support program, which has protected more than 9 million jobs, is ending on Saturday. A replacement program taking effect Sunday requires firms and workers to bear more of the cost, and there are fears that hundreds of thousands of jobs could be axed over the winter.
While the Treasury says its economic measures are always kept under review, the chancellor is likely to point to extra assistance he announced this month, under which the state will pay workers of companies forced to close because of coronavirus restrictions two-thirds of their wages. The firms themselves will be eligible for grants worth as much as 3,000 pounds ($3,900) a month.
The British Retail Consortium said no shops should have to close in another lockdown, after those deemed "non-essential" lost 1.6 billion pounds ($2.1 billion) a week in sales in April and May. Doing so again would do "untold damage," it said in a statement.
Faced with a pandemic-weary public, the government will need to find a way to communicate the upside to further restrictions. Johnson is likely to make the case that by acting now, things could be as close to normal as possible by Christmas, when families will want to gather in close proximity. The prime minister's own scientific advisers proposed a two-week lockdown in September, which ministers rejected at the time.
The most recent COVID-19 data also gives Johnson cover to tighten restrictions. Cases have been rising at a record pace and and hospital admissions are now exceeding even the most pessimistic projections of the government's scientific advisory panel, papers released Friday showed.
France, Germany, Spain and Italy have also imposed partial lockdowns this month with cases rising at record rates across Europe where more than 215,000 people have died and nearly 7 million have been infected.
A member of the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or SAGE, said the trajectory is clearly going in the wrong direction, and if it doesn't change, the hospitals will come under pressure. The baseline of measures in the country's strictest tier won't be enough to get the transmission rate below the critical level of 1, the person said, asking not to be named because the information is confidential.
The government announced 326 new coronavirus deaths on Saturday.
SAGE had called in September for a two- to three-week lockdown coinciding with October school holidays to rein in transmission, but the adviser said a lockdown would now need to be longer in order to have the same effect. A national lockdown is now inevitable, the person said.
The National Education Union called for schools and colleges to be included in any lockdown, restricting classes to the children of essential workers — as the government mandated in the spring. But ministers have repeatedly said schools will remain open.
Wales last week adopted a "firebreak lockdown" until Nov. 9 to try to get the transmission rate down. Scotland has said it will continue with a regional approach, though its five-tier system includes tougher measures in the worst-hit areas than England's equivalent.
Without new restrictions, the U.K. is on course for a higher death toll than during the first wave of the pandemic, with one of the models studied suggesting deaths could reach more than 4,000 a day, the BBC reported, citing documents it saw. That's about four times the level at the first peak of the virus in the U.K.
