UK Covid live: people ‘should avoid unnecessary socialising while Omicron threat remains unclear’

Health chief says reducing social contacts and getting booster jabs could help keep new variant’s spread at bay

Good morning. We’ve got another day where politics will be largely dominated by news and debate about the measures being taken in response to the emergence of the Omicron variant. There will be a debate and vote in the Commons, statements from the Scottish and Welsh governments, and a press conference from Boris Johnson this afternoon, focusing on booster vaccines. And this morning Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), has been on the Today programme. The new Covid restrictions for England announced by the government were relatively minimal compared with what they might have been - many countries have significantly tougher rules for Delta - but Harries gave a hint of of how scientists’ preferences are some way ahead of what politicians are willing to legislate for when she said it would better if avoided unnecessary socialising.

Harries stressed that we still don’t know how serious is the threat posed by Omicron. Asked if she wanted to see more people working from home (a measure in the UK government’s plan B, but not one that it has yet implemented), Harries told the programme:

We’ve seen is, in fact, that not everybody has gone back to work. I’d like to think of it more in a general way, which is if we all decrease our social contacts a little bit, actually that helps to keep the variant at bay. So I think being careful, not socialising when we don’t particularly need to and particularly going and getting those booster jabs.

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Coronavirus | The Guardian

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