'No alternative’ to lockdown: PM Johnson

Boris Johnson said there is “no alternative” to imposing a coronavirus lockdown across England to stop the health service being overwhelmed as he revealed plans for whole cities to be tested to root-out asymptomatic carriers of the disease. The UK prime minister rejected criticism he was too slow to act, telling lawmakers he had done his “level best” to avoid national restrictions due to come into force Thursday.Pubs, restaurants, non-essential shops and gyms will be closed for four weeks and socializing will be severely restricted in a bid to curb the spread of the virus, although schools and nurseries will remain open, Johnson said.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Monday, Johnson said the number of deaths could be twice as high as the first wave in the spring without urgent action.“Faced with these latest figures, there is no alternative but to take further action at a national level,” he said. If the health service is allowed to be overwhelmed “doctors and nurses could be forced to choose which patients to treat, who would live and who would die,” he told lawmakers.

But he faced anger from some of his own Conservative colleagues over the plan. Veteran MP Charles Walker warned the UK is drifting “further into an authoritarian coercive state” under the measures. “The people of this country will never, ever forgive the political class for criminalizing parents seeing children and children seeing parents,” he told Johnson. Ministers have been working to defuse tensions among Tory lawmakers ahead of the vote, and Johnson spoke with his party’s MPs over the weekend.Johnson underlined the government’s new focus on mass testing, pointing to “cheap, reliable, rapid turnaround tests” that could be used in schools and elsewhere to allow the economy to keep moving before the much-anticipated roll-out of a vaccine next year.