COVID-19: Johnson urges people to stay home as UK records highest single-day death toll

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who recently tested positive for COVID-19, urged people to follow the government advisory to beat the coronavirus pandemic. Johnson took to Twitter to convey the message of social distancing as the death toll soared by 563 in a day, taking the overall nationwide total to 2,352.

Johnson has been under quarantine after he tested positive for the coronavirus and headed the first-ever digital cabinet meeting on March 31. The UK government has been running #StayHomeSaveLives campaign to encourage people to practice social distancing and stay at home as much as possible.

Britain’s first-ever digital cabinet session was organised days after United Nations met via video conference for the first time in its history. United Nations Security Council (UNSC) even approved four resolutions on March 31 through video conferencing. 

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'Signs of slowdown'

UK's top epidemiologist, who led the modelling study for the impact of the novel coronavirus, recently said that the United Kingdom is showing signs of a slowdown in the spread of COVID-19. Speaking to BBC Radio on March 30, Neil Ferguson said that probably 2-3 per cent of the UK population has been infected by the virus but at least a third of them remains asymptomatic.

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Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, revealed that the antibody tests are in the final stage and ready in “days rather than weeks”. The researcher himself was tested positive for the novel coronavirus after closely working with UK’s top officials on coronavirus response.

Ferguson led the research in which the team claimed that the pandemic would have resulted in more than half a million deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the United States in case of no mitigation measures. The researchers used the data gathered from Italy to project the impact of the pandemic if positive interventions are not made at the earliest.

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