Controls needed ‘for months’ says Matt Hancock as mutant strain rages ‘out of control’

The Health Secretary said the country was facing an “enormous challenge” after scientists warned the new variant could be up to 70% more transmissible than the original virus.

During a round of broadcast interviews he said that everyone in the country needed to take “personal responsibility” for their actions to help curb the spread of the disease.

However, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said Boris Johnson should apologise for his “gross negligence” after he failed to act earlier to curb the spread of disease.

Millions of families had their Christmas plans plunged into disarray after the Prime Minister announced on Saturday that London and the South East were to go into a new two-week lockdown in an attempt to get the disease back under control.

People across the rest of England were told that household mixing over the festive period would be restricted to Christmas Day only – a move quickly followed by the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales.

Welsh health minister Vaughan Gething told BBC News on Sunday that the new variant was “effectively seeded” across the country and was a factor in the rapid rise of cases in Wales.

Mr Hancock acknowledged that the speed of the changes had left people feeling “cross, frustrated and in many cases angry” but said ministers had had a “duty” to act when they were presented with the scientific evidence.

He said he was “really worried” about the NHS which was now treating almost as many hospital patients with the disease as it was at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in April.

“The new variant is out of control and we need to bring it under control,” he told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show.

“We don’t know how long these measures are going to be in place. It may be for some time until we can get the vaccine going.”

He said that more measures were needed to control the new variant than were required for the original coronavirus.

“We know with this new variant you can catch it more easily from a small amount of the virus being present,” he told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme.

“We know that because we know that in November that in the areas where this new variant started, in Kent, the cases carried on rising whereas in the rest of the country the November lockdown worked very effectively.

“It is an enormous challenge, until we can get the vaccine rolled out to protect people. This is what we face over the next couple of months.”

Mr Hancock insisted they had acted “very quickly and decisively” after ministers were told on Friday by scientists on the Government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) that the VUI 202012/01 strain was spreading more quickly.