Boris Johnson will meet with senior ministers and officials on Tuesday to decide whether to use hotels to quarantine travellers arriving in the UK to stop the spread of new coronavirus variants from overseas.
The prime minister, who is under pressure from lawmakers in his own Conservative Party to set out a road map for leaving the country’s third national lockdown, said on Monday that stricter curbs on travellers are being worked on by his team.
“It is incredibly important that we are cautious at the border,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a televised briefing Monday evening when asked about the plan. “It is also reasonable to take a precautionary principle to protect this country whilst we work on the science and the analysis of the different variants that are discovered around the world.”
The UK’s death toll is likely to pass 100,000 this week and, with hospitals close to capacity and infections still high, Johnson is some distance from meeting the conditions he set for loosening national restrictions when he imposed them on January 4.
‘Protect Our Population’
Ministers see mass vaccination as the UK’s ticket out of lockdown, and the National Health Service has so far given shots to 6.6 million people, including 79 per cent of those over 80 years old.
Increased border controls, including quarantining arriving travellers in hotels as countries such as Australia and Singapore have done, could help to keep out any strains that might undermine the effectiveness of the doses being administered.
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“We want to make sure that we protect our population, protect this country against reinfection from abroad,” Johnson said in a pooled TV interview on Monday. “That idea of looking at hotels is certainly one thing that we’re actively now working on.”
The UK has also offered to share its expertise in testing and analysing new strains of the virus to help keep a cap on outbreaks around the world, Hancock will say in a speech Tuesday. British genomics expertise will be available either through testing of samples or training and advice for other countries, his office said in a statement.
The prime minister warned that lifting lockdown rules too quickly would risk a new surge of infections, amid growing pressure from rank-and-file Tories to lay out a time frame for reopening the economy.
‘Show Us a Plan’
Restrictions are due to be reviewed in mid-February, by which time Johnson hopes to have hit his target to vaccinate almost 15 million people considered most vulnerable to the disease, but there are growing indications the timetable for lifting the lockdown is slipping, potentially even into summer.
That has alarmed prominent Tories including Mark Harper and Steve Baker, who have called on ministers to set out a road map for easing the curbs, especially reopening schools, and the criteria they will use for doing so.
“Once the vulnerable are protected, the first priority should be to start reopening schools,” Harper said on Twitter on Monday. “The Government needs to show us a plan.”
Johnson reiterated that his government’s priority is to reopen schools as fast as possible, though he said any lifting of the lockdown must be done in a “responsible, cautious way.”
“There’s nothing I want to do more than reopen schools,” he said. “We want to do that in a way that is consistent with fighting the epidemic and keeping the infection rate down.”