Greater Manchester’s pubs and restaurants are to be closed from next week and the region placed into three tier lockdown according to leaked briefings this morning
The Times reports that Boris Johnson signed off on a new lockdown for much of the north at a meeting last night, alongside a previously trailed “traffic light” or three-tier system of restrictions for England.
The highest tier will see pubs, restaurants and cafés forced to close, with leisure venues also shut, but schools, universities and other businesses remaining open.
Tier 1 will keep the current “rule of six” and 10 p.m. hospitality curfew, Tier 2 adds in a ban on households mixing
The paper also reports that the Chancellor Rishi Sunak has agreed a new version of the furlough scheme for local lockdown areas, with wage support for employees that is “more generous” than the Winter Economy Plan announced last month
Leaked documents to the Manchester Evening News found that on current levels by the end of the month admissions in Greater Manchester are forecast to reach the level of the first wave in April. If trends continue they will reach 238 a day in three weeks, up from seven a day at the end of last month.
By then the region is projected to have 20,000 new infections a day, higher than the national total at present.
