Severe restrictions have been announced in an effort to combat Coronavirus, please follow NHS and Government advice.

From tonight, people will only be allowed to leave their homes for:

  • Essential shopping – once a day
  • Exercise – once a day
  • Medical reasons or the care of the vulnerable
  • Travel to essential work

The government say they will immediately:

  • Close all shops selling non-essential goods
  • Stop all gatherings of more than two people in public
  • Stop all social events​, including weddings and other ceremonies, but allow funerals

Parks will remain open for exercise but gatherings will be dispersed, he says.

“If you don’t follow the rules the police will have the powers to enforce them, including through fines and dispersing gatherings,” Johnson added.

Boris Johnson also said: “No prime minister wants to enact measures like these. If too many people become unwell at the same time, the NHS will be unable to handle it.”

Official guidance, click to enlarge.
Official guidance, click to enlarge.

What is essential work?

Your work is essential if you work in one of the critical sectors listed below:

  • Health and social care – All NHS staff, including administrative and cleaning workers. Frontline health and social care staff such as doctors, nurses, midwives, paramedics, plus support and specialist staff in the health and social care sector. In addition it includes those working in supply chains including producers and distributors of medicines and personal protective equipment including producers and distributors of medicines and medical and personal protective equipment.
  • Education and childcare – This includes childcare, support and teaching staff, social workers and those specialist education professionals who must remain active during the COVID-19 response to deliver this approach.
  • Key public services – This includes those essential to the running of the justice system, religious staff, charities and workers delivering key frontline services, those responsible for the management of the deceased, and journalists and broadcasters who are providing public service broadcasting.
  • Local and national government – This only includes those administrative occupations essential to the effective delivery of the COVID-19 response, or delivering essential public services, such as the payment of benefits, including in government agencies and arms length bodies.
  • Food and other necessary goods – This includes those involved in food production, processing, distribution, sale and delivery, as well as those essential to the provision of other key goods (for example hygienic and veterinary medicines).
  • Public safety and national security – This includes police and support staff, Ministry of Defence civilians, contractor and armed forces personnel (those critical to the delivery of key defence and national security outputs and essential to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic), fire and rescue service employees (including support staff), National Crime Agency staff, those maintaining border security, prison and probation staff and other national security roles, including those overseas.
  • Transport – This includes those who will keep the air, water, road and rail passenger and freight transport modes operating during the COVID-19 response, including those working on transport systems through which supply chains pass.
  • Utilities, communication and financial services  – This includes staff needed for essential financial services provision (including but not limited to workers in banks, building societies and financial market infrastructure), the oil, gas, electricity and water sectors (including sewerage), information technology and data infrastructure sector and primary industry supplies to continue during the COVID-19 response, as well as key staff working in the civil nuclear, chemicals, telecommunications (including but not limited to network operations, field engineering, call centre staff, IT and data infrastructure, 999 and 111 critical services), postal services and delivery, payments providers and waste disposal sectors.

If workers think they fall within the critical categories above, they should confirm with their employer that, based on their business continuity arrangements, their specific role is necessary for the continuation of this essential public service.

George Allison
George Allison
George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison
Twitter

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

23 COMMENTS

  1. Well I am 2nd generation family business, but not being in the “vital” category, I will shut down tomorrow. In normal times, I would not want government help, but as I am forced to shut, I will need that help. There is vague government talk of help, but no concrete, “you are getting this, but not that”, so I could plan. I do my PAYE through the gov real time system, so a notification through that to each business of what they will & will not get & when they will get it, would help business survival planning.

    • Same here John, I’m a self employed business manager, looks like we are entitled to nothing. I am already thinking of ways I can potentially operate and maintain the business (at least keep it viable) from my closed office.

      It’s not open to the public and it’s in walking distance from my house. So it’s ‘doable’.

      Thanks ‘so much’ all those dim fuc*ing idiots, who just had to get together for a sunny weekend and forced the government’s hand!

    • Hi John,

      If you are a small business and exempt rates, then you are due a £10k grant, which should be dealt with automatically sometime in April by your local council. The government will also cover 80% of any of your employees’ salaries (including yours), and there are additional business interruption loans (up to £5Million if I recall) which are 0% interest for 12 months. I think there may well be more too, but these may be worth following up for a start.

      Things are tough, no doubt, my wife runs her own business too. Hang in there!

        • I hear that some countries in the Far East, are coming out of lockdown. Thanks to pollution, they have a habit of wearing facemasks & a good supply chain for them. Looking at the economic forecasts of the lockdown for the UK, USA & Europe, I wonder if we would be better to lift the lockdown, if we can get everyone to wear facemasks (when out), have hand sanitiser at every shop, office & factory entrance & offer more of the over 55s the pneumonia vaccine.
          I hate to agree with Trump, but he may be (partly) right when he says “the cure should not be worse than the disease”.
          The UK chemical & brewing industries are turning to making hand sanitiser. If we can get the UK paper industry to turn out lots of cheap facemasks & the government to order more pneumonia vaccine, then perhaps we can get the Country working again, before individuals, firms large & small, go bust.
          We need to stop UK Government debt from growing way beyond our ability to even pay the interest on it. Landing future generations with a poor, bankrupt, debt laden Country, will not do them any favours.

  2. It is not clear to me if Vets are to remain open? They should, as animals need medical care too, and are a great moral booster for isolated people as well as much loved family members.
    I guess comes under the Medical category.

  3. All
    Give us time, we are working on it. We will get to all of you – one step at a time.
    Most vulnerable first, then those who have “created their own”.
    We were let down by some at the weekend, but we were not surprised – society is a cross section of people after all and it was sunny (in March).
    Life does go on, it’s just different.
    The MoD making a cluster of the next review if not left unchecked is one such example where nothing in the long run changes.
    So UKDefencejoirnal.org.uk – the USMC has just announced it’s totally redefining the way it fights…..

    • Yes, so the USMC is getting rid of its 3 tank brigades, just as the Chinese & Russians are showing off their new armour. If the USMC wanted to swap a heavy 57+ton M1 for a more deployable medium tank, such as the 26 ton M8 or similar, I could understand it, but ditching tanks altogether seems unwise.
      Also getting rid of all policing functions, may leave them open to theft & fraud.

      • Seeing what the USMC plans to scrap (MV-22, M1 tanks, artillery, F-35B & C) I did start to think there is a chance for the UK to buy some of this at perhaps a knockdown price.

  7. The core government instruction is very clear, ‘STAY AT HOME.’ The media this morning is going ape about the lack of clarity, and jumping up and down, about what are basically peripheral issues and accusing Boris of a lack of leadership? But the message is clear to me and many others, do as instructed. Governments around the World have all had to create policy over the virus on the hoof, and some have been better at it than others, but it’s still a steep learning curve. So, apart from the hysterical British media, if we do as instructed it could result in 85% avoidance of infections when the Coronavirus reaches its peak. I’d call that a success, in what is a difficult situation for the Government, and the population of our country.

  8. Problem is governments have tried to manage panic with messages of its manageable etc.

    In my own personal view ( although a very well informed view).

    The Very first message should have been A punch in the face. With a we are at war type message.

    I’m not sure why they needed to wait for the Imperial College London modelling to realise that not doing very much would lead to many hundreds of thousands dead and be an National catastrophe worse that the Second World War is extraordinary measures were not taken…I will us capitals here: “IT WAS FUCKING OBVIOUS WHAT THE LIKELY RISK WAS BY FEBRUARY” the disease had a reported R0 of 2-3, 0% of the population had immunity, it hospitalised around 10% of people with 5% needing ventilation and it had a mortality of somewhere around 1-3%, that is the face of a global killer we have not seen since 1918.

    In context The flu kills something like 10,000 a year, and in a bad year puts the nhs on its knees and that only has an R0 of 1.5, we have a large percent of the population with some immunity, have a vaccination program and it only has a mortality rate of around 0.1%, hospitalisation rate of 1% ect….Covid 19 spreads at twice the rate, is 10 time more harmful and unlike flu every single person who is inoculated will get the disease.

    But with our early language and commas we seem to have managed to convince a large percent of the population that it was just like a nasty flu year….not a global killer that will leave millions dead across the world unless we essentially stop almost all activities and social interaction across the globe….1% of 7 billion is more than any war has ever taken.

    Don’t work around the restrictions, go shopping etc……stop ! stay indoors ! stay apart and do your duty to humanity.

    • I wonder whether a potential issue with your “very first message should have been a punch in the face” suggestion might be right there near the start of your post – “although a very well informed view”. Not everyone has such informed views.

      I am reminded with depressing regularity that, because I am a physicist and computer scientist with constant exposure to mathematical thinking for as long as I can remember, I have a fairly intuitive/immediate connection and understanding of concepts like exponential growth, percentages vs absolute numbers etc and that I tend to forget that there are a lot of people out there who really don’t understand such concepts quite as intuitively as I do. I even encounter such disconnections from basic mathematical concepts in surprisingly educated people e.g. someone I know was trying to compare 2 job offers (both very significant six-figure packages so these were seniour positions) and was trying to factor in the value of the stock options in each case where company A was offering about three times as many stock options as company B. My first question to my friend was what was the total share base for each company so that the number of options could be converted into percentage holdings and from there the possible potential values compared (obviously after other data had been collected such as company revenue, profitability, and dilution characteristics). The person I was talking to hadn’t even asked the most basic questions and was simply going with a “30,000 is three times as big as 10,000” comparison!

      All your maths is good (I have also read the ICL paper very carefully) but I wonder, had the very justified alarm claxon been sounded much earlier i.e. when we were looking at very low 100s of cases and a handful of deaths, whether much of the population – probably egged on by most of the less analytical mainstream media(*) – would have been totally dismissive of such mathematical rationale and as a result would actually have aligned themselves even more strongly with the “what a ridiculous over-reaction, I’m more likely to die in a car accident let alone seasonal flu” (thereby showing a total inability to grasp the difference between a broadly static vs a growing number) and thus become even harder to spur into stronger action (social distancing, self-isolation, closure of shops and services etc) further down the line. I’m not saying that much stronger action shouldn’t have come far less “further down the line” than it has, I’m just saying that as well as the maths maybe there were also genuine psychological issues at play re concerns of entrenching a “this is an over-reaction” attitude too early making future action more difficult to implement.

      (*) who I often think tend to echo their readerships views back to them rather than try to present cold hard truths because acting as an echo chamber for their readership generates more sales than risking alienating them by challenging their preconceived views.

      • Unfortunately you are right. The ability of most people to not see something that does not match their world view can be stunning.

        I have been telling my relatives in no uncertain terms what was heading our way.Even when I carefully explained the evidence, maths, how infectious diseases work and that they needed to prepare. I got back “what are you taking about it will be fine, the NHS will deal with it”

        It went over their heads that the person telling them he was in fear of what was coming was a healthcare professional with 25 years of experience thinking about and managing risk of death and harm within health systems (one of those people who regularly sits around considering deaths and harm/managing major incidents and how health service and professionals work, or not in extremis)

        I could literally see on their faces as their brains just rejected the concept of what I was saying and its meaning to humanity over the next couple of years.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here