Schools across Britain to close from Friday due to coronavirus

Schools across Britain will close on Friday in response to coronavirus, but children of key workers will continue to attend classes. Boris Johnson said children of healthcare workers, police and emergency personnel and delivery drivers were among those who would continue to go to school.

The move comes amid mounting speculation that London will be put under more stringent measures within days, with bars and restaurants ordered to close and travel in and out of the city severely curtailed.

"We live in a land of liberty, as you know, and its one of the great features of our lives that we don't tend to impose those kind of restrictions on people in this country. But I have to tell you we will rule nothing out, and we will certainly wish to consider bringing forward further and faster measures where that is necessary to suppress the peak of the epidemic to protect our NHS, to minimise casualties and to minimise suffering," Mr Johnson said.

The prime minister was speaking after it was announced that a further 32 people in Britain had been killed by the virus, bringing the total to 104. Some 56,221 tests have been carried out, and 2,626 people have tested positive, up from 1,950 on Tuesday.

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The government plans to double the testing capacity so that 25,000 tests will be administered every day.

A day after promising a three-month mortgage holiday to homeowners, Mr Johnson has moved to ban landlords from evicting tenants for three months.

“We will want to protect people who face difficulties through no fault of their own. We cannot penalise people for doing the right thing, nor when we have an economic upset that is a result of the government advice to protect the public. Everyone who experiences that disruption is entitled to protection and support, and that is what we will provide.”

During prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Mr Johnson promised more support for people who lose their jobs, telling opposition MPs that a universal basic income was among the options under consideration.

Symptoms

Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London whose research prompted Mr Johnson to impose more stringent measures this week, said on Wednesday that he was experiencing symptoms of the coronavirus.

He told the BBC that several academic colleagues had also reported symptoms.

“Central London is really the hotspot in the UK at the moment. There are almost certainly thousands of cases in central London,” he said.