Boris Johnson announces a third national lockdown

Boris Johnson has announced that England is going into a third national lockdown – but a much stricter one than we saw in the autumn. The government has also been forced to accept that A-levels and GCSEs will not be going ahead this year because all schools will close from tomorrow, save for vulnerable children and the children of key workers.

In a televised address to the nation, the Prime Minister asked people to stay at home from Monday, with a legal requirement to do so being introduced in regulations this week. The lockdown will run until the middle of February. He explained that scientists had concluded the new variant was 50-70 per cent more transmissible and that hospitals are under the worst pressure of the entire pandemic. He argued that a lockdown which was ‘tough enough’ to slow the spread was necessary until the vaccine had been sufficiently rolled out.