Prime Minister says another national lockdown would be 'psychologically damaging' as he rejects idea

Mr Johnson was joined by Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, at the latest coronavirus press conference on October 22.

Asked whether England would look at what lessons could be learned from circuit-breakers in Wales and Northern Ireland, Boris Johnson rejected the idea of another “national lockdown”.

The Prime Minister said: “I think that that really would be economically, socially, psychologically really very damaging and difficult for the country.”

Mr Johnson defended his approach to tackling the coronavirus outbreak, warning that an “extreme laissez faire” response, giving people greater freedom, would result in “many thousands more deaths”.

He said another lockdown was “not the right course” for the UK, “not when the psychological cost of lockdown is known to us, the economic cost, and not when it has been suggested that we might have to perform the same sort of brutal lockdowns again and again in the months ahead”.

However the R number – the reproduction rate of the virus – remains above one, meaning it is spreading.

Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance stressed at the briefing the need to reduce coronavirus infections to avoid placing pressure on the NHS.

He told a Downing Street press conference: “The more patients there are with covid, the more the pressure on the healthcare system overall, and the more the other conditions get affected because people don’t have the capacity to deal with it.”

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