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Bloomberg
Boris Johnson defended his decision to put most of England into the highest levels of pandemic restrictions even as the rate of infection across the UK fell to its lowest level since mid-August.
Leading members of Johnson’s Conservative Party have said the government’s new three-tier system to contain the coronavirus when the national lockdown ends next week is too harsh because it groups broad regions together, even if some areas are not hot-spots.
Their argument is likely to be bolstered by the latest data, which indicates the virus is no longer spreading exponentially in the UK. For the first time since August 14, the so-called R-rate, which estimates how many people each infected person passes the disease on, had a ceiling of 1, the government said. It estimated the range at 0.9 to 1, based on data to November 24.
This will be seen as a sign that the England-wide lockdown in force since November 5 is putting the outbreak into reverse, although the economic damage of shuttering shops and restaurants for a second time is yet to be counted.
New rules will come into force on December 2, dividing the country into one of three tiers of restrictions — officially ranked medium, high, and very high risk. Only two out of 46 regions of the UK are in the lowest tier, prompting backlash from some Tory members of Parliament.