Millions more Britons face being plunged into Tier 4 lockdown this week

Millions more Britons face being plunged into Tier 4 this week as the mutant Covid-19 strain continues to spread across the country.

The next tier review is on December 30 and infections continue to climb and hospital admissions increase. 

The UK reported 30,501 new COVID-19 cases on Sunday, with a further 316 deaths within 28 days of a positive coronavirus test, government statistics showed. 

Infections soared by 57 per cent last week and the spread of the new strain is now taking hold further north after first being detected in Kent, reports The Times.

As a result millions more now face being told to ‘stay at home’ when the tiers are reviewed on Wednesday after a loosening of the rules over Christmas.

Health chiefs warned the number of Covid patients in hospital will overtake the first wave peak of 21,683 by the end of the year. 

Some hospitals have even begun setting up makeshift intensive care beds in paediatric and cancer wards.

Some trusts predict they will have a third or half of all of their beds filled with Covid patients by New Year’s Eve. 

The most up-to-date seven-day hospital admission average is 1,984. Hospital admissions are currently at a higher figure than the week before the second lockdown – where there was a seven-day average of 1,191. 

One senior government official told the publication that the new strain of Covid had overtaken the old and was ‘running rampant’ in the UK.  

It comes as scientists have warned that the whole of England should be put into Tier 4 immediately to stop the spread of the new mutant coronavirus strain.

SAGE have said thousands more people will now be infected in the new year, with one of their experts Dr Zubaida Haque yesterday questioning why the government haven’t placed the whole country under the toughest restrictions to save lives.  

She tweeted: ‘Given that we surpassed 70,000 #COVID19 deaths in UK on Christmas Day, and there are now more patients with coronavirus in hospital than at any point in the pandemic, why hasn’t the government implemented #tier4 restrictions everywhere in the UK? @IndependentSage are very worried.

‘Given the crisis situation we’re in with the highest number of daily deaths with #COVID19 in 2nd wave, with 1000’s more likely to be infected because of relaxation of rules in tier 1-3 on Christmas Day AND failed govt’s test & trace system, we need #tier4 everywhere now to save lives.’  

The mutant strain of coronavirus has sparked fear as the number of cases rise dramatically, especially in London and the Home Counties. 

And researchers have now said there is ‘some evidence that the increase may be particularly marked in children’, which raises the question of whether schools should open in January after the Christmas break.

The new variant will lead to a wave of coronavirus cases and deaths that will peak in spring 2021 for London, the South East and east of England, they said.  

It comes as millions more people moved into Tier 4 yesterday after those already under the tightest coronavirus restrictions celebrated a Covid Christmas any way they could.   

Sussex, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire moved into Tier 4, created in response to a variant of Covid-19 discovered in the UK, on Saturday.

The parts of Essex still in Tier 2, Waverley in Surrey and Hampshire including Portsmouth and Southampton, but with the exception of the New Forest, also moved into the toughest tier.

The additional six million that went into Tier 4 took the total number of people under the toughest restrictions to 24 million – 43 per cent of England’s population. A further 24.8 million moved to Tier 3.            

It came after many had to make the most of a Christmas Day already under Tier 4 restrictions in London and the south east.