The UK prime minister’s office at Downing Street would not be drawn on whether Plan B measures – stricter rules to deal with the Omicron variant – were due to be put in place.An official spokesman said Johnson had taken part in a “standard meeting” on Wednesday where he was presented with the latest data on coronavirus. He said: “We would set up any changes should they be required in the normal way.”
Asked whether people should go into work on Thursday, he added: “The restrictions are as set out, there are no restrictions on that, and as we have throughout we will update should any changes be necessary.”
UK reports a further 115 cases of the Omicron variant in EnglandIn the UK, a further 115 cases of the Omicron variant have been reported across
England, the UK Health Security Agency said. It brings the total number of confirmed Omicron cases in
England to 448, the agency said.
There have also been four additional cases of the Omicron variant in
Wales, the UKHSA said, and the first three cases reported in
Northern Ireland.
Across the UK in total, there have been 131 additional cases, bringing the total number of confirmed Omicron cases in the UK to 568, the agency said.
Another UK-wide lockdown cannot be ruled out given the rapid spread of the new Omicron variant, a leading scientist has said. MetroProfessor Neil Ferguson said a ‘Plan B Plus’ will likely be needed in the coming weeks to try to slow down the spread of the strain while more research is done on how dangerous it actually is.
The Imperial College London academic, whose work was instrumental in bringing about the first lockdown in March 2020, has predicted Omicron will become the dominant variant in the UK before Christmas.
New orders to work from home could be needed while no measures, including lockdowns, can yet be dismissed, Prof Ferguson told the BBC.
The scientist, who is a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) but was speaking in a personal capacity, said: ‘Certainly case numbers of Omicron are doubling at least every three days, maybe even every two days at the moment, so it’s accelerating very fast and put that in context, it’s the same if not faster than we saw with the original strain of the virus in March of last year. So it is a concern.
‘It’s likely to overtake Delta before Christmas at this rate, precisely when is hard to say.
‘We’ll start seeing an impact on overall case numbers – it’s still probably only 2%, 3% of all cases so it’s kind of swamped, but within a week or two, we’ll start seeing overall case numbers accelerate quite markedly as well.’
Prof Ferguson said the peak of this wave of infection will be in January if no measures are taken to slow it down.
Neil Ferguson said restrictions now can help slow down the spread of the variant (Picture: REX/Shutterstock)Restrictions could be helpful to slow down the spread of the variant so that more people can get their booster jabs, which are likely to better protect against infection from Omicron.
‘I think the key question is whether the country decides to adopt measures to either slow it down or try to stop it and that will critically depend on really the threat it poses in terms of hospitalisations,’ Prof Ferguson said.
‘At the moment, we don’t really have a good handle on the severity of this virus, there’s a little hint in the UK data that infections are a little bit more likely to be asymptomatic, but we really need to firm up that evidence at the current time.’
Asked whether people should be told to work from home, he said: ‘It will be up to the Government to decide what to announce in the coming days and weeks.
‘There is a rationale, just epidemiologically, to try and slow this down, to buy us more time principally to get boosters into people’s arms because we do think people who are boosted will have the best level of protection possible, but also to buy us more time to really better characterise the threat.
‘So if you imagine a kind of Plan B Plus with working from home might slow it down – it wouldn’t stop it but it could slow it down, so it’s doubling rather than every two or three days, every five or six days.
‘That doesn’t seem like a lot, but it actually is potentially a lot in terms of allowing us to characterise this virus better and boost population immunity.’
Regarding lockdowns, Prof Ferguson said it was very difficult to rule out anything, adding that we ‘haven’t got a good enough handle on the threat’.
Omicron cases are doubling every two to three days (Picture: Metro)He added: ‘Clearly, if the consensus is it is highly likely that the NHS is going to be overwhelmed then it will be for the Government to decide what he wants to do about that, but it’s a difficult situation to be in of course.’
Pushed on whether lockdowns might be possible, he said: ‘It certainly might be possible at the current time.’
It comes as speculation mounts that the Government is
preparing to introduce more measures to deal with rising cases. Downing Street sources insisted ‘no decisions have been made’ but work from home orders and vaccine passports could be announced as early as this afternoon.
Omicron is causing such alarm among scientists and politicians because it appears to be more transmissible and is better at evading vaccines.
Prof Ferguson pointed to a new lab-based study from South Africa suggesting the
Pfizer vaccine works less well against Omicron.
He added: ‘There’s a little bit of preliminary work even from the UK which suggests if you’ve had two doses, for instance of Pfizer, then just protection against mild disease may be roughly halved.
‘But we think that protection against severe disease is much more likely to be maintained at the high level, but we don’t have firm data on that. That’s just based on extrapolation from past experience.’
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