MICHAEL Gove is to chair an emergency Cobra meeting with the leaders of the devolved nations to discuss the UK’s response to the Omicron variant - not two weeks after Downing Street rejected calls to do so.
In late November, a letter sent from Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to Boris Johnson warned that “anything less than a four-nations approach will be ineffective”.
They called for a Cobra meeting to discuss the variant to be immediately convened - but the Tories in No 10 rejected the idea within hours.
Now, in a climbdown which suggests Downing Street is taking Omicron more seriously, Gove is to lead exactly the kind of Cobra meeting that the devolved leaders had requested.
Gove, as the Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, will host the meeting with the first ministers and deputy first ministers on Friday afternoon to discuss Covid-19 data and coordination on the response.
The news comes as Nicola Sturgeon told Scotland that the more transmissible Omicron variant threatens to create a “tsunami of infections”.
She said that the new variant could overtake Delta as the dominant strain in the country within days, and urged businesses to delay their Christmas parties.
Cases of Omicron are reportedly doubling every two days.
Sturgeon further asked people to make sure they are testing regularly and complying with all existing guidance.
However, household contacts of positive coronavirus cases in Scotland will be forced to self-isolate regardless of testing negative for the virus, Nicola Sturgeon has said.
The First Minister said the Scottish Government will “consider its next steps very carefully” in the wake of the new Omicron variant spreading through the country.
But she told the coronavirus briefing in Edinburgh: “Given that Omicron is now becoming dominant, our response to it has to be more general.”
She added: “From tomorrow, our advice will be that all household contacts of any confirmed Covid case should isolate for 10 days, regardless of their vaccination status and even if they initially get a negative PCR test.
“I know this is not easy and we will obviously keep it under review, we will also ensure careful exemptions for critical services but we believe this to be essential at this moment to help slow transmission.”
Rules for close contacts not living in the same household as the positive case remain unchanged.
No 10 said there were “no plans” to go further with coronavirus restrictions.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesperson was asked whether there would be a published Plan C, if current measures did not work.
He said: “There’s no plans to go beyond what we’ve set out already.
“Obviously we need to keep the characteristics of this variant under review, and we would act if necessary, but there’s no plans to go beyond what we set out.”
He said: “As a responsible Government, of course, you would expect us to… we have an array, already, of options available to us in terms of what measures we can take to mitigate a growth of any variant or virus.
“But there are no plans to go beyond that currently.”
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The news comes as a Scottish Government evidence paper revealed that cases of the new Covid-19 variant could reach just shy of 25,000 a day before the end of the month, a Scottish Government evidence paper has said.
The upper range of the document’s worst-case scenario projection for the Omicron variant falls just short of 25,000 cases daily by December 20, while the most-likely range of the worst-case scenario will see cases hit a little over 15,000.
The upper range of the most-likely scenario puts the number of daily cases by that date at around 7000, while the central range is just under 5000 cases.
In the best-case scenario, cases will peak at just over 1250 a day.
Unless the Omicron variant is “substantially” less serious than the Delta variant, it is likely the NHS will face greater pressures, the document revealed.
“It is likely that a proportion of these infections will result in hospitalisation,” the paper said.
“To avoid the NHS being put under severe pressure Omicron would need to be substantially less severe than Delta (either because of the characteristics of Omicron or the effectiveness of vaccination against severe disease) given the very substantial number of infections projected.”
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