Health Secretary Matt Hancock has suggested that new tighter restrictions in London and southeast England could stay in place for some time, saying a new variant of the coronavirus that has emerged is very difficult to control.

Asked whether people living under the stringent tier 4 restrictions should expect to do so for some time, Hancock told Sky News: “We really need to get this under control … We’ve got a long way to go to sort this, essentially we’ve got to get that vaccine rolled out to keep people safe.”

Hancock added that people can catch the new variant more easily from a “small amount” of the virus.

“Given how much faster this new variant spreads, it’s going to be very difficult to keep it under control until we have the vaccine rolled out.”

He later told the Andrew Marr show

“I am really worried about the NHS. There are currently just over 18,000 in NHS hospitals with coronavirus.
“That is only just below the number there were at the first peak. It is another reason why everybody needs to follow the new rules and take that personal responsibility.”

On the same show Dr Susan Hopkins, of Public Health England, said the new variant was identified in the middle of October through genome sequencing.

The variant continued to spread and in December, while trying to establish why Kent and Medway’s infections continued to rise despite the restrictions, they found a cluster that was “growing very fast” which had spread from the south of England into London and Essex.

“We still did not understand what the difference in transmissibility was and this week the modellers and academics that we work with… demonstrated that it was indeed more transmissible than other variants circling,” she told the show.

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