LONDON | British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Thursday that it was necessary to “be tough now” to contain a second wave of the new coronavirus, compared to the second “bump” of a camel, and save Christmas, dear to the British.
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“The only way to ensure that the country can enjoy Christmas is to be tough now,” insisted the conservative leader in an interview with tabloid The Sun.
“So if we can (…) stop the second hump of the camel, flatten the second hump. Dromedary or camel? I do not remember if it is a dromedary or a camel which has two humps. Hmmm. Check, ”he added.
Using another metaphor in March, during the first wave of Covid-19 disease, Boris Johnson pledged to “flatten the sombrero”, in reference to the shape of the curve of the epidemic.
In an attempt to curb the spread of the virus, he called on the population to respect the ban on meeting more than six people (children included) in England, inside and outside. The other nations of the country decide their own sanitary rules.
He also said he was considering instituting a curfew for pubs in England. “These are the kinds of things we will be looking at,” he said.
But he wants to avoid a new national confinement, which would be devastating for an economy already very weakened by the pandemic. “The essential thing now is that I do not wish to go back to some kind of great containment that prevents businesses from functioning,” he stressed.
Local containment measures, such as bans on gathering between different outbreaks, have however already been put in place to contain outbreaks of the disease, and new restrictions are expected to be announced Thursday in the north-east of England, where almost two million people live.
New contaminations have skyrocketed in the United Kingdom, exceeding the mark of 3,000 daily cases for several days and even approaching that of 4,000 on Wednesday. The country is the most bereaved in Europe with nearly 41,700 dead.
But positive cases could be more numerous, with many people with symptoms failing to access a screening test, drawing the government to heavy criticism.
“I fear that at the moment the system is struggling with the real burden of demand,” conceded Boris Johnson, pledging once again to increase screening capacity to 500,000 daily tests by the end of October.