LONDON, Apr 16 (APP):The United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Thursday evening declared that coronavirus lockdown would stay for at least another three weeks despite growing alarm at the economic consequences.
The Foreign Secretary confirmed the public’s ‘efforts are starting to pay off’ but draconian curbs cannot yet be lifted after he chaired a meeting of the cobra emergency committee.
He said scientists believe transmission in the community is ‘almost certainly’ below the level at which the outbreak will peter out, although there is still spread in hospitals and care homes.
‘Based on this advice the government has decided the measures must remain in place for at least the next three weeks,’ he told the daily Downing Street briefing.
The UK has announced 861 more deaths from the coronavirus, taking the total number of victims to 13,729,UK media quoting the Foreign Secretary said.
They said Britain has now officially diagnosed more than 100,000 people with the virus – making it only the sixth country in the world to do so. But the rising number of cases remains stable, with just 4,618 positive tests in the past 24 hours resulting in a total case count of 103,093.
Dominic Raab on the occasion batted away calls to set out an ‘exit strategy’ from lockdown tonight and instead he merely offered five criteria for when the lockdown could start being loosened.
They were as under:
1. Ensure NHS can provide enough critical care treatment
2. A ‘sustained and consistent fall’ in daily death rate
3. Reliable data showing rate of infection is decreasing to manageable levels
4. Testing capacity and PPE supply are ready to meet future demand
5. There is no risk of second peak to overwhelm the NHS
In a speech in Downing Street, Mr Raab – who is deputising for Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he recuperates at
Chequers – said: ‘Overall, we still don’t have the infection rate down as far as we need to.
‘As in other countries we have issues with the virus spreading in some hospitals and in care homes and in sum, the very clear advice we have received is that any change to our social distancing measures now would risk a significant increase in the spread of the virus.
‘That would threaten a second peak of the virus and substantially increase the number of deaths.
‘It would undo the progress we have made to date and as a result would require an even longer period of the more restrictive social distancing measures.
‘So early relaxation would do more damage to the economy over a longer period and I want to be really clear about this.
‘The advice from SAGE is that relaxing any of the measures currently in place would risk damage to both public health and our economy.’
Raab added: ‘Based on this advice which we very carefully considered the government has decided that the current measures must remain in place for at least the next three weeks.’
He said the public needed to show ‘patience’ and stick with the restrictions to stop the spread of the virus.
‘There is light at the end of the tunnel but we are now at both a delicate and a dangerous stage in this pandemic,’ he said.
‘If we rush to relax the measures that we have in place we would risk wasting all the sacrifices and all the progress that has been made.
‘That would risk a quick return to another lockdown with all the threat to life that a second peak to the virus would bring and all the economic damage that a second lockdown would carry.’,he remarked.
Raab said when the government has met its criteria it will look to adjust the measures to make them ‘as effective as possible in protecting public health whilst allowing some economic and social activity to resume’.
‘But we will only do it when the evidence demonstrates that it is safe to do it,’ he said.
‘It could involve relaxing measures in some areas while strengthening measures in other areas.’, he said.
