Breaking News: Boris Johnson says Second Wave ‘Is Coming’

A ‘Second wave is coming’ says Boris Johnson as he sounds the COVID alarm and warns that an ‘inevitable’ surge is on its way.

Government ministers stress emergency plans being drawn up stopped just short of a full national lockdown as Nightingale hospitals are put on 48 Hour standby notice.

The Prime Minister has said he does not want to put the country in another national lockdown but warned the government may need to “intensify things to help bring the rate of infections down”. He added: “We’re now seeing a second wave coming, clearly we are going to keep everything under review. Boris Johnson added that a second nationwide lockdown was the ‘last thing anybody wants’ but revealed his administration was considering whether it needed to ‘go further’ to halt the new virus surge.

A slew of new measures including localised lockdowns all across the country have been put in place this week. While visiting the Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre construction site near Oxford, Mr Johnson said: ‘I don’t want to go into bigger lockdown measures at all, we want to keep schools open and it is fantastic the schools have gone back in the way they have. We want to keep the economy open as far as we possibly can, we want to keep businesses going.

‘The only way we can do that is obviously if people follow the guidance.’

Ideas on the table are essential travel to schools and workplaces continuing, but restaurants and bars would be shut – or perhaps run on very restricted hours. As being put in place in the Northeast- different households would be asked not to mix.

St Andrews University in Scotland has asked students to go into voluntary lockdown for the weekend from 7 pm this evening. A further 4,322 people have tested positive for coronavirus in the UK, an increase of nearly 1,000 cases from the previous day. Many thousands still have not been able to have a test for COVID despite waiting hours in queues. It is understood that many key workers are still self-isolating as they cannot obtain a certificate to say they are ‘COVID free’.