London, United Kingdom:
England’s chief health-related officer Chris Whitty confirmed Saturday that a new coronavirus strain which surfaced in the nation could spread more quickly and named for higher public vigilance to lower transmission.
Whitty stated London had informed the World Health Organization of its findings.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock on Monday stated scientists had identified a “new variant” in the south of England that could be causing infections to spread more quickly.
Britain has noticed increasing circumstances and hospital admissions this month and Prime Minister Boris Johnson was set to give a press conference on the virus predicament on Saturday afternoon.
The prime minister was reportedly to announce new travel restrictions for London and southeast England in the run-up to Christmas.
“As a result of the rapid spread of the new variant, preliminary modelling data and rapidly rising incidence rates in the South East (an expert body advising the government) now consider that the new strain can spread more quickly,” Whitty stated.
“We have alerted the World Health Organization,” he stated, but added: ‘There is no present proof to recommend the new strain causes a larger mortality price or that it impacts vaccines and treatment options even though urgent work is underway to confirm this.”
Whitty warned that the new evidence made it “more crucial than ever” that the public did all they could to reduce transmission.
On Friday, 28,507 new daily positive tests were reported by the UK government. Cases last week grew 40.9 percent compared to a week earlier.
More than 1.98 million people have tested positive in the UK.
People in Wales and Northern Ireland are set go into new lockdowns after Christmas.
Johnson has refused to rule out a new lockdown in England, saying Friday: “We’re hoping really substantially that we will be in a position to prevent something like that.”
“But the reality is that the prices of infection have enhanced really substantially in the final couple of weeks,” he stated.
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