News conference on the measures against Omicron

The PM gave an emergency news conference this evening, November 27, at 5 pm GMT to the UK public on the measures against Omicron. He started off giving a cordial good afternoon and apologised for disturbing our Saturday.

In his speech, he told the conference that so far, “the vaccine plan has been working and the UK has had the fasted vaccine rollout in Europe and now the fastest booster campaign in Europe with almost 16.8 million boosters in people’s arms” He admitted that even though the case numbers have admittedly remained relatively high, the country is seeing falling hospitalisation rates and falling numbers of deaths.

“Our scientists are learning more hour by hour and know that this variant can be transmitted to people who have been double vaccinated and might reduce the effectiveness of our current vaccines”. Therefore, the PM urged us to “take precautions now whilst we find out more”. He then went on to outline the measures against Omicron.

Measures against Omicron on home soil are simple, face masks are now compulsory in shops and on public transport to protect all around. The PM emphasised the need to vaccinate. “We need to get more people vaccinated and more people boosted as well as help the NHS to prepare for what is already looking like a challenging winter”

If a person tests positive with a suspected case of Omicron they are to isolate for 10 days regardless of their vaccination status.

In the Uk, the variant needs to be slowed down, in addition to locating arrivals from the countries affected by the virus in the last 10 days, the travellers will also be required to provide the details of all the people they have been in contact with since arriving in the UK.

Four more countries have been added to the red list and arrivals from the whole world will now face precautionary testing. Any person entering the UK will have to take a PCR test by the end of their second day after arrival and to self-isolate until they have a negative result.

Boris expressed “his deep gratitude to the scientists in South Africa who identified this new variant and shared this information widely and immediately”

The PM ended his news conference by saying “most importantly, we need to bolster our protections against this new variant, we don’t know how effective our vaccines will be against Omicron, but we have good reasons for believing they will provide some measure of protection and if you’re boosted your response is likely to be stronger ¡, so it’s more vital than ever that people get their jabs and we get those boosters into arms as fast as possible. So, from today, we are going to boost the booster campaign. We already plan to do 6 million jabs in England alone over the next 3 weeks and now we’re looking to go further…We’re looking at giving boosters as wide a group as possible and as well as reducing the gap between your second dose and your booster”

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