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On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson levied a stricter new national lockdown. Britain's desperate race to vaccinate its population is risked being outdone by a fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus that was on track to beat the nation's careworn hospitals.
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Virus Variant Rages Sweeping Britain to Re-enter Lockdown
In England, Mr. Johnson ordered learning institutions to lockdown and shifted to remote learning after several days of alarmingly high and ever-increasing case numbers. He appealed to Britons to stay at home except for a few necessary reasons, including essential work and buying food and medicine.
Officials warned that the nationwide lockdown would remain until at least the middle of February.
Mr. Johnson's decision was a fresh setback coming at the arrival of two vaccines, which seemed to provide relief from the nine fraught month crisis and ferocious criticism of his pandemic handling.
On the day that the good news of the first doses of AstraZeneca-developed vaccine and the University of Oxford were administered, the sweeping type lockdown's reinstatement was used last spring when the plague was first endangered and ran out of control, drowning it out.
Lately, in London and southeast England, the new and highly transmissible virus variant has taken hold, instigating an alarming spike of close to 60,000 a day in case numbers and putting hospitals under an acute burden.
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On Sunday, Mr. Johnson accepted that the current daily life controls were insufficient. Nevertheless, the first declaration of a full-scale lockdown came from Scotland, not from England, where first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has steadily stirred further and faster to tame the pandemic.
Ms. Sturgeon speaking in Edinburgh, said that citizens of mainland Scotland would be obliged to stay at home and work from there if possible. Simultaneously, adoration places would be a lockdown, and schools would mainly operate by remote learning.
In a televised address, Mr. Johnson said, "It's clear that we need to do more together to bring this new variant under control while our vaccines are rolled out."
He added that though the weeks forward may be one of the hardest yet, he believed Britain was "entering the last phase of the struggle because, with every jab that goes into our arms, we are tilting the odds against Covid and in favor of the British people."
In England, people were being encouraged to conform to the new lockdown rules immediately. Yet, until Wednesday morning, some of the new restrictions will not be given legal force, and there is likely to be a Parliamentary vote, which is being specially recalled.
The deployment of the much cheaper and easier to store AstraZeneca vaccine has made all the ministers celebrating. They believe it could help Britain win the battle against the virus aside from the lockdown.
Nonetheless, Britain's race to roll out its mass vaccination program involves high-stakes before its overstretched health service is overwhelmed by the new variant.
Mr. Johnson's office said on Monday, "The government has raised its Covid alert to its highest level for the first time, warning of a "material risk of health care services being overwhelmed. there were more than 26,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals, an increase of 30 percent from the previous week, and cases are rapidly rising across the country."
