, Columnist
What Boris Johnson Has Planned for Post-Lockdown Britain
After getting the U.K.’s coronavirus strategy so wrong at the start, it’s little wonder that the prime minister is being much more cautious on the reopening.
Awkward questions.
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The instruction given by Boris Johnson to the British people on March 23 was dead simple: “You must stay at home.” The pithiness and urgency of that message, the alarming rise in deaths, and the U.K. prime minister’s subsequent hospitalization with Covid-19 all reinforced the instruction. People got it.
Some say it was too successful. Many Britons don’t seem to want to come out of lockdown now. The all-important R number — the average number of people infected by one person — is now said to be below one. But how to keep it there while getting people back to work?