Boris Johnson will deliver a televised address on Covid booster vaccines to the nation at 8 pm, amid growing concerns about the highly infectious Omicron variant.
The prime minister s intervention follows a further 1,239 cases of the variant confirmed on Sunday in the UK, nearly double the number reported the previous day.
There are major worries in Whitehall at the UK Health Security Agency UKHSA that having two doses of a Covid vaccine is less effective against symptomatic infection from Omicron than the current dominant variant, Delta. Johnson isn't expected to announce any new Covid restrictions.
Cases have recently increased to levels that have not been seen since England s third lockdown, with 58,194 new infections reported on Friday the most since 9 January. The figure dropped to 48,854 on Sunday, reflecting the usual weekend effect.
Ministers were relatively relaxed about higher case levels because the link between infection and serious illness including hospitalisations and deaths had been severely weakened, but they now fear Omicron could have changed the equation.
The education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, revealed earlier on Sunday that there are patients treated with Omicron in the hospital. He told Sky News that the variant was highly infected and that very quickly Omicron will be the dominant variant in the United Kingdom and probably the rest of the world. Zahawi said Johnson would be saying more on Sunday about speeding up the rollout of boosters and that it is now a race between the booster and the Omicron variant. The number of true Omicron cases that have not been discovered or sequenced yet is likely to be up to 10 times higher than the number of confirmed cases, according to Zahawi.