Tehran 23 March_While Britain’s death toll from the coronavirus has reached 281, with the youngest victim aged 18 and the oldest 102, the British prime minister warned that if people continued to congregate in parks and markets, his government would consider tougher measures to enforce social distancing.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club(YJC)_The UK could face close to a year of social distancing measures to safeguard the NHS’s ability to cope with coronavirus, according to newly published scientific advice to ministers.
“I don’t think you need to use your imagination very much to see where we might have to go, and we will think about this very actively in the next 24 hours,” the PM told reporters in Downing Street on Sunday.
“We need to think about the kinds of measures that we’ve seen elsewhere, other countries that have been forced to bring in restrictions on people’s movements altogether.”
Despite having recently ruled out restricting travel in and out of London or introducing the kind of lockdown imposed in parts of France, Spain and Italy, Johnson said on Sunday that he would consider introducing such measures at the moment they can have the maximum effect.
“At the moment when the epidemic is hardly spreading at all, that’s not the moment to impose curfews and prohibitions on movement and so on and so forth. You’ve got to wait until, alas, it’s the right moment to do it,” he said.
His warning about social distancing came as the National Health Service told 1.5 million people with specific medical conditions that make them vulnerable to the virus to stay in their homes for the next 12 weeks.