The Health Secretary Matt Hancock has denied that the rushed measures introduced last night were to prevent large gatherings ahead of today’s Muslim Eid Festival
He told the Radio Four Today programme “My heart goes out to the Muslim communities in these areas because I know how important the Eid celebrations are. I am very grateful to the local Muslim leaders, the imams, who have been working so hard across the country to have Covid-secure celebrations,”
“Unfortunately this change does mean that people won’t be able to get together in their houses, in their gardens.
“But we are allowing mosques and other religious places to stay open because they’ve done so much work to allow for Covid-secure celebration and worship.”
Earlier on BBC Breakfast the Health Secretary said the new measures were because Test and Trace data has shown “most of the transmission is happening between households” and between people visiting family and friends.
“Whenever anybody tests positive, the vast majority of them we manage to speak to, and we ask which contacts they’ve had, and that’s shown that the vast majority of contact of people who have the virus, other than people in their own household… is from households visiting and then visiting friends and relatives.
“One of the terrible things about this virus is it thrives on the sort of social contact that makes life worth living and that is a serious problem with the virus.”
