Boris Johnson (pictured in front of the Downing Street tree) today refused to rule out tougher Covid curbs at Christmas
Boris Johnson today refused to rule out tougher Covid curbs at Christmas, merely insisting the festive season will be 'better' than last year.
The PM dodged when he was asked if he was certain the alarming spread of the Omicron variant would not require harsher restrictions.
'This Christmas will be considerably better than last Christmas,' he said during a visit to Merseyside. The tighter rules on masks and isolation are due to be reviewed by December 18 - meaning that people might not know until a week before Christmas Day what limits they face.
Whitehall sources have suggested there is little prospect of the restrictions being loosened before the New Year, as scientists try to establish the scale of the threat.
There are warnings today that the incoming Omicron wave could be as bad or worse for the NHS than the second coronavirus peak last winter even if the super-mutant variant is weaker than its predecessors.
Real-world data suggests the highly-evolved variant is three-and-a-half times more likely to infect people than Delta because of its combination of vaccine resistance, increased infectiousness and antibody escape.
There have been only 246 official Omicron cases confirmed in the UK so far, but there are likely more than a thousand already, according to Professor Paul Hunter, an epidemiologist at the University of East Anglia.
Professor Hunter said he expected it to become the dominant variant 'probably within the next weeks or a month', based on how rapidly it is outpacing Delta in the South African epicentre.
In total, there are 46,000 Covid cases on average each day in the UK and data from the Covid Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) suggests the new strain is already behind around one in 66 of them, or 1.4 per cent
Total Covid cases are rising fastest in London and the South East of England with most of the Omicron infections linked to travellers flying back into the UK
Mr Johnson was asked this morning whether the government had acted too late in demanding travellers to the UK take pre-departure tests.
'No, I think what we're doing is responding to the pandemic,' he said.
'We were the first country in the world to take decisive measures to tackle Omicron. We put about 10 countries automatically, immediately, on to the red list and we
