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‘We cannot beat this virus with ideologies’ - World Health Organisation
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https://scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3091130/uk-reimposes-lockdown-coronavirus-hit-city-leicester Europe
UK reimposes lockdown on coronavirus-hit city of Leicester
- New infections in the city of some 340,000 people made up 10 per cent of all cases in England in the last week
- Businesses will close in the city starting Tuesday, with schools following suit in the coming week
The British government is reimposing lockdown restrictions in the central England city of Leicester after a spike in coronavirus infections. Photo: AP
Britain on Monday reimposed lockdown measures on a city hit by an outbreak of coronavirus, in the first big test of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “whack-a-mole” strategy to control the disease while getting the economy moving again.
Ministers ordered schools and non-essential shops to be closed and postponed the planned reopening of pubs in the central English city of Leicester after an alarming spike in cases of Covid-19.
Britain has suffered the deadliest outbreak of the virus in Europe, with more than 43,000 deaths, but Johnson last month began easing nationwide stay-at-home orders imposed in late March.
Amid warnings he was moving too fast, with infection and death rates falling but slowly, he vowed to clamp down on local outbreaks like the game “whack-a-mole”.
Virus-hit hospitals and factories have been shut so far but the measures in Leicester, with a population of 340,000, is the first move to restore lockdown on such a large scale.
“We must control this virus. We must keep people safe,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told parliament after a lengthy meeting with local leaders, some of whom had opposed the measures.
“Local action like this an important tool in our armoury to deal with outbreaks while we get the country back on our feet.”
The dramatic action threatened to overshadow Johnson’s big speech on Tuesday setting out how he plans to “build, build, build” to get Britain out of a deep recession brought on by the lockdown.
Johnson said Britain needed the type of massive economic response that US president Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilised to deal with the Great Depression.
He has earmarked £1 billion (US$1.2 billion) for school repairs and a further £4 billion for “shovel-ready” projects that cover everything for road maintenance to public transport.
In extracts of his speech released by Downing Street, Johnson said his plan “sounds positively Rooseveltian, it sounds like a New Deal”.
Roosevelt launched the New Deal programme in the 1930s that created a comprehensive social care system whose legacy lives on to this day.
The number of infections recorded worldwide has topped 10 million, with more than 500,000 dead.
Britain is the hardest-hit country in Europe in terms of infection numbers, with more than 43,500 Covid-19 deaths recorded.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are determining their own contact restrictions.
The World Health Organisation on Monday warned the coronavirus pandemic was “not even close to being over”.
“We all want this to be over. We all want to get on with our lives,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“But the hard reality is this is not even close to being over,” he said, adding that “although many countries have made some progress, globally the pandemic is actually speeding up”.
Agence Francre-Presse and DPA