Covid news live: Latest updates as Boris Johnson says tougher measures to be announced

Nicola Sturgeon has announced new lockdown rules, effective from midnight tonight until the end of January, with a legal requirement for everyone in Scotland to stay at home except for essential purposes.

Political editor Andrew Woodcock reports:

The former health secretary, Jeremy Hunt has called for an immediate new national lockdown while the vaccine is rolled out to the most vulnerable.

Mr Hunt, who now chairs the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, said the NHS had never faced such a crisis as it is in currently.

“All the evidence has been very clear that countries that act earlier and more decisively end up both saving more lives and protecting their economies,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One. “This is a new strain, it is incredibly dangerous but this time, in a way, action is easier because we have the vaccine.

“We know that we are talking about essentially a 12-week period by the end of which everyone who needs to will have been vaccinated. For the sake of that period it is just worth biting the bullet on this.”

In this handy article, Chiara Giordano explores what a new national lockdown would look like and how it would differ from current tier 4 restrictions:

The new Covid-19 variant is “spreading quickly throughout Wales”, the country’s health minister has said.

Vaughan Gething told a press conference that cases of coronavirus in Wales “remain very high”, though rates have fallen back from “incredibly high levels” seen before Christmas.

“The overall incidence rate for Wales has fallen from a high of 636 cases per 100,000 people on 17 December to 446 cases today,” Mr Gething said.

“This is still far too high. There have been falls in most parts of Wales, except in North Wales, where we are seeing cases rise quickly. We believe this is because of the new fast-moving strain.

“It’s too early to know if these falls are because of the Christmas period and fewer people coming forward for testing or if they are early, positive signs of a sustained slowing of this awful virus.”

Mr Gething said that while the number of people being tested had fallen, the testing positivity rate across Wales was 25 per cent.

Boris Johnson said earlier today there is “no question” tougher measures will now be needed to tackle rising Covid infections.

Adam Forrest looks at when the next lockdown or tiers announcement is expected:

According to Glenn Campbell, BBC Scotland’s political editor, Scotland could announce a new lockdown that would come into force from midnight tonight, with a “legally enforceable stay at home rule”.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is due to make a statement in Holyrood at 2pm today.

Dr June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA, has said she is “really looking forward to the months to come” after the agency approved two coronavirus vaccines.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, she said: “This is such an exciting time and we’re full of optimism about going forward with effective and safe vaccines and possibly medicines that are coming through the pipeline to help defeat this terrible virus.

“It’s a feeling of huge optimism and really I think ownership of the role the regulator can play in delivering safe vaccines and medicines with that independent stamp of approval through to patients, the public and the healthcare system.”

Asked about concerns on safety, Dr Raine said: “I want everybody to be absolutely confident that the standards of rigour, of science, of thoroughness, have been just what everyone would expect.”

She added that “no stone has been left unturned, no corner has been cut”.

Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, has called on the government to close schools and borders, and to implement a ban household mixing immediately as he warned that the pressures facing hospitals are “off-the-scale-worse” than previous winter crises.

Writing on Twitter, the chairman of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee said: “Time to act: thread on why we need to close schools, borders and ban all household mixing RIGHT AWAY.

“To those arguing winter is always like this in the NHS: you are wrong. I faced four serious winter crises as Health Sec and the situation now is off-the-scale worse than any of those.

“It’s true that we often had to cancel elective care in Jan to protect emergency care but that too is under severe pressure with record trolley waits for the very sickest patients.”

Read his full Twitter thread below:

The leader of England’s largest council has urged the government to impose a new national lockdown.

Ian Ward, Birmingham’s Labour city council leader, said he fully expected the government to “recognise the seriousness of the situation” and carry out a U-turn by announcing tougher restrictions to be imposed as early as this week.

He said Birmingham city was “not in a position to wait” for cases to surge to levels seen in some London boroughs and urged minister to “act early for once and get ahead of the curve”.

The University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust (UHB), which runs four hospitals across the city, currently has an intensive care bed occupancy rate of 98 per cent, added Mr Ward.

Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of the SPI-M modelling group which advises the government on the spread of coronavirus, warned that closing schools would not be enough to get the virus under control without increased public adherence to existing rules.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that keeping pupils away from class might not get the R number – the reproduction rate of the virus – below one.

Dr Tildesley, from Warwick University, said the government needs a clearer message: “The communication has not been quite so good in recent months, some of the changes in policy have been a little bit vague.”

He added: “It’s not clear, actually, with the work that we’ve been looking at, that closing the schools, for example, may be sufficient to bring the R number below one with the levels of adherence we’ve got now.

“So they do need to think of alternative measures to get people back on side and get those levels of compliance we had before.”

He added that “we can’t have a situation where schools are closed for months” so that would need to be done “in tandem with something else, which is trying to ramp up adherence to control measures, making these subtle changes to try to bring incidence down, and, ultimately, hopefully long term, allowing children to go back to school safely”.