Boris Johnson: Second COVID-19 Wave is Coming In, Lockdown is Last Thing Anyone Wants

By Staff, Agencies

As the United Kingdom recorded another 4,322 confirmed COVID-19 cases, Public Health England's medical director Yvonne Doyle made the dire prediction of "far worse things to come", with the government looking at a spate of scenarios and potential measures to stanch the spread of the virus.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted on Friday that Britain was “now seeing a second wave coming in” of the coronavirus epidemic.

“We're looking very carefully at the spread of the pandemic as it evolves over the last few days and there's no question, as I've said for several weeks now, that we could expect [and] are now seeing a second wave coming in. We are seeing it in France, in Spain, across Europe – it has been absolutely, I'm afraid, inevitable we were going to see it in this country,” Johnson was cited as saying by the Daily Mail.

Suggesting that the UK might be lagging behind countries like Spain and France, who are witnessing a surge of coronavirus cases, by around six weeks, Johnson said Downing Street was contemplating six months of “on-off” restrictions as a means of tackling the developments.

He also expressed concerns that the public has been ignoring rules on social gatherings, such as the recently announced “rule of six”.

“On Monday, we brought in the measures that we did, the “rule of six”, to really try and restrict what people are doing and to bring in a new buffer. But the crucial thing is at the same time to observe the basic rules on social distancing – hands, face, space – that is what everybody has got to do if we want to continue to beat this thing,” said Johnson.

He also insisted that a second lockdown was the “last thing anybody wants”, but added that the current measures would need to be kept “under review”.

“I don't want to go into bigger lockdown measures at all, we want to keep schools open. We want to keep the economy open as far as we possibly can, we want to keep businesses going. The only way we can do that is obviously if people follow the guidance,” said the Prime Minister.

The British government has been looking into diverse winter scenarios and possible ways to alternate periods.