UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has expressed concern over new coronavirus variant and said his country is “anxious” about it, adding that the government is “ruling nothing out” to tackle its spread.
“We want to make sure that we take all the prudential, all the cautious steps now that we could take,” Xinhua news agency quoted Johnson as saying to Sky News on Thursday.
“So there are meetings going on today to consider exactly what we need to do,” he said.
His remarks came after some cases of the new variant were detected in Britain. Meanwhile, scientists have also raised concerns that the current vaccines may need to be updated to defeat this new variant of the virus, which was first detected in India.
However, Johnson said the easing of lockdown will go ahead as planned for now.
The Prime Minister said he “can see nothing that dissuades me from thinking we’ll be able to go ahead on Monday and indeed on June 21 everywhere” in terms of easing coronavirus restrictions in England.
“I think we have to wait a little bit longer to see how the data is looking but I am cautiously optimistic about that and provided this Indian variant doesn’t take off in the way some people fear, I think certainly things could get back much, much closer to normality,” he said.