PM Johnson charts path out of lockdown

The coronavirus lockdown will ease next week for most of Britain’s population, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Thursday.

In England, up to six people will be able to meet outside and schools will gradually reopen from Monday, Johnson said at a news conference.

“These changes mean that friends and family can start to meet their loved ones, perhaps seeing both parents at once or grandparents at once,” he said, adding that outdoor retailers and car showrooms would also be able to open from Monday.

“You could have meetings of families in a garden, you could even have a barbecue provided you did it in a socially distanced way, provided everybody washes their hands, provided everybody exercises common sense.”

Johnson stressed that the changes were “small tentative steps forward”, and health experts warned the situation remained finely balanced with new cases declining, but not very quickly.

All shops still solvent after being forced to lock up for 12 weeks can open their doors on June 15.

The devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own public health policy.

The move to ease lockdown measures came as England launched a new testing and contact tracing system on Thursday for COVID-19 patients, seen as crucial to helping ease lockdown measures.

Contacts of those who test positive for COVID-19 will be asked to isolate for 14 days, even if they have no symptoms.

The tracing service, which will have a task-force of 40,000 specialists to test those with symptoms and identify their contacts, will initially rely on what the government described as people doing their “civic duty”, but sanctions could be introduced if people did not comply.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have similar programmes just about to launch or already running.

Britain abandoned a strategy of testing and tracing in March when the virus started spreading exponentially and there was insufficient capacity to test more than a fraction of those with symptoms.

Official data show that more than 48,000 Britons have died from confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.