FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
LONDON In the end he had to give up. Boris Johnson, in a dramatic televised press conference, announced a second national lockdown: from next Thursday all “non-essential” shops, as well as pubs and restaurants, will have to close; instead, save schools and universities, but internal travel will be strongly discouraged. The measures will remain in effect until December 2, in the hope that they will somehow manage to “save” Christmas.
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The script of last March was repeated: when, while one by one the European countries decided to close, Johnson continued to resist the appeals that came to him from his own scientific advisors. Even this time, the British premier insisted until yesterday that everything had to be done to avoid a generalized lockdown: but in the meantime the strategy of local closures proved to be completely insufficient. Ed he was forced into yet another humiliating reverse.
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Already in September, government experts had called for a two-week lockdown to break the contagion curve: their request had been rejected in the name of the need to avoid a collapse of the economy. Johnson had preferred to introduce a system of local restrictions, depending on the severity of the situation: and while the North of England had ended up in the very high risk category, London was also banned from going to a pub or restaurant with friends. . But in mid-October the Sage, the committee of experts that supports the government, presented a nightmare painting: in the worst but reasonable scenario, the second wave of the coronavirus would have ended up causing as many as 85,000 deaths, much more than the 45,000 recorded so far since March. And in the following days the contagion curve began to rise at an even faster rate than expected in that same scenario: in the last 25 hours there have been 21,915 new cases and 326 deaths from the coronavirus.
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At this point Johnson, also pressured by several ministers of his government, was no longer able to resist. But the question now: how long will the second lockdown really last? And what if it doesn’t work? The idea that filters from the government that Great Britain will have to prepare for a long winter, with forms of restriction standing until April. The battle has just begun.
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31 October 2020 (change October 31, 2020 | 20:10)
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