Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced new lockdown restrictions in a press conference at Downing Street on Wednesday. The new restrictions are being introduced as cases of COVID-19 in the UK have been worryingly rising in the past days.
Will England go back into lockdown?
Mr Johnson said the new measures introduced today was to “not have another lockdown”.
He said: ”These measures are not another national lockdown.
”The whole point of them is to avoid a second national lockdown.”
READ MORE: Boris Johnson speech in full: Read PM’s speech on UK lockdown HERE
The Government said that as of 9am on Wednesday, September 9, there had been a further 2,659 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus.
Overall, 355,219 cases have been confirmed.
The Government said 41,594 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for COVID-19 as of Wednesday.
Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have now been 57,400 deaths registered in the UK where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate.
The Prime Minister said the Government is “working hard” to increase testing capacity to 500,000 a day by the end of October.
He said: “Up to now, we have used testing primarily to identify people who are positive – so we can isolate them from the community and protect high risk groups.
“And that will continue to be our priority. We are working hard to increase our testing capacity to 500,000 tests a day by the end of October.
“But in future, in the near future, we want to start using testing to identify people who are negative – who don’t have coronavirus and who are not infectious – so we can allow them to behave in a more normal way, in the knowledge they cannot infect anyone else with the virus.”
