UK PM unveils “conditional plan” for next-phase response to COVID-19 pandemic

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed his government’s approach to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic in the next phase in his address to the nation Sunday evening.

The prime minister said that the government has a plan to ease lockdown, but “it is a conditional plan,” and since “our priority is to protect the public and save lives, we cannot move forward unless we satisfy the five tests.”

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This is “not the time simply to end the lockdown this week,” instead ” we are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures,” said Johnson.

The government is also establishing a new COVID-19 alert system run by a joint biosecurity center, according to Johnson. The alert level “will tell us how tough we have to be in our social distancing measures — the lower the level, the fewer the measures.”

For that matter, Italy on Sunday recorded its lowest one-day COVID-19 death total and the smallest number of new infections in more than two months, Italy’s Ministry of Health said.

The 165 deaths recorded over the last day was the lowest since March 9, the day Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte declared Europe’s first peacetime lockdown, as the country sought to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The 802 new infections recorded over the previous 24 hours was the lowest total since March 6.

Those numbers compare to 194 and 1,083 a day earlier.

The total death toll from Italy’s coronavirus outbreak is now 30,560, while the total number of infections is 219,070.

The positive trends continued a week into Italy’s “Phase 2,” which refers to a loosened version of the national coronavirus lockdown, which started March 10.

Source: Xinhua