Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced this afternoon (23/12) that more areas of England will be moved to Tier 4 from Boxing Day: including Cambridge.

Other areas entering Tier 4 restrictions include Sussex, Oxfordshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Waverley (in Surrey), and all parts of Hampshire excluding the New Forest.

Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner, in response to the announcement, said in a press release that “it is the right decision for Cambridge to go into Tier 4. The new strain of the virus is spreading very quickly.” He also expressed concern that “Addenbrooke's [Hospital] is super-busy and more people are getting ill.”

Boris Johnson’s Saturday press conference (19/12) saw no Tier change for Cambridge, with the town remaining under Tier 2 restrictions, but today’s announcement will now see the whole of Cambridgeshire placed under Tier 4 restrictions from this Saturday (26/12). 

Elsewhere, Bristol, Gloucester, Somerset, Swindon, the Isle of Wight, the New Forest, Northamptonshire, Cheshire and Warrington will all come under Tier 3 restrictions, meanwhile Cornwall and Herefordshire will be moved under Tier 2 restrictions.

The announcement comes as 39,237 new cases of Covid-19 were reported today (23/12) in the UK according to government data, with 744 further deaths.

236,275 cases have been reported in the last seven days, marking a percentage rise in cases of 61.3% on the previous seven days.

Anxieties surrounding the new variant of the virus, which is considered to be 70% more transmissible than its original form, have increased significantly over the past week. This comes as the BBC reported earlier this week that the variant was “first detected in September” and made up “around a quarter of cases in London” in November.

Hancock prefaced the press conference by staying that action was “vital,” especially “against this backdrop of rising infections” and called on the public to limit the “social contact that the virus thrives on.” 

On this, Zeichner expressed his condolences with the public as “the virus is once again out of control,” adding that even after “all those sacrifices...it feels like we are back to where we were in March.”

Hancock proceeded to comment on the vaccine, which he called the “great hope for 2021,” and told the public that with each dose “we get a little bit closer to the life we want to get back to.”