UK could go into a month-long lockdown to ‘pay’ for five days off at Christmas

The UK could face a month-long lockdown to ‘pay’ for five days of eased restrictions over Christmas, experts have said.

According to scientists, 25 days of lockdown – which would most likely come in January – would be needed in exchange for a long weekend with friends and family over the festive period.

Initially, Dr Susan Hopkins, the medical director of Test and Trace, explained to a Downing Street briefing that we would need ‘two days of tighter measures’ for every day restrictions were eased.

However, Public Health England (PHE) has now said it would actually need to be five days rather than two, meaning a substantial lockdown would be needed to balance it out.

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A spokesman for SAGE, the government’s advisory body, said: “Susan Hopkins referred to ‘Sage advice previously’ as showing that for every one day of ‘release’ two days of tighter restrictions would be needed.

“She misspoke here, the Sage advice actually referred to modelling indicating that for every one day of relaxation five days of tighter restrictions would potentially be needed.”

This follows reports this week that the government is considering relaxing the current lockdown rules, allowing people to meet indoors over Christmas.

Christmas Eve is on a Thursday this year, and Monday December 28th is a Bank Holiday, so the proposals would allow friends and family to meet for five days between these dates.

While it’s unknown how many people would be allowed to meet up over this period, reports suggest there might be a limit of ten.

Dr Hopkins also warned that everyone still need to be ‘very careful’ about the number of people we come into contact with to avoid spreading the virus as much as possible.

She said: “So coming into Christmas, we’ll need to be very careful about the number of contacts we have to reduce transmission before Christmas and get our cases as low as possible.

“Hopefully the government will make the decision that will allow us to have some mixing but we will wait and see what that is.

“And then I think once we’ve got past the Christmas period, if there’s been a release and some socialisation, we’ll all have to be very responsible and reduce those contacts again.”

She added: “We are very keen that we have a Christmas as close to normal as possible.

“That requires all of us to make every effort over this national restriction period and even in early December to get the cases as low as possible and to reduce the risk of transmission within households and between families.

“A final decision of course will rest with the government and we look forward to hearing what those plans are.”