PM Johnson warns angry Britons of 'tough winter'

LONDON • British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he accepts the public is angry with his handling of the pandemic, as officials confirmed thousands of positive cases had been missed from Covid-19 test results.

After months of criticism and amid a slide in the polls, he also warned that the country still faces a "very tough winter" ahead.

"I know people are furious and they're furious with me," he said on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme on Sunday. "It's going to be bumpy through to Christmas, it may even be bumpy beyond."

The public, he said, should live "fearlessly but with common sense". His message was aimed at trying to persuade the public of the difficulty of his task to strike a balance between suppressing the virus as new cases rise and keeping the economy open.

Politically, he is seeking to use the Conservative Party's conference - forced online this year - to reassert his authority on a fractious party and reset the agenda for his government.

Meanwhile, Public Health England said 15,841 positive test results had been missed from official daily Covid-19 figures between Sept 25 and Oct 2. The error was due to a technical issue in the automated processing of data, the agency said. It took the daily figures announced on Sunday to over 22,000 cases.

Mr Johnson yesterday sought to play down the failure, saying the much higher updated figures were more in line with forecasts of the outbreak's spread. The glitch is likely to cast further doubt over his handling of the pandemic: his Conservative government's response has been cast by political opponents as slow, poorly organised and confusing.

"The incidence that we're seeing in the cases really sort of corresponds to pretty much where we thought we were," Mr Johnson told reporters. "To be frank, I think that the slightly lower numbers that we'd seen didn't really reflect where we thought that the disease was likely to go, so I think these numbers are realistic," he added.

Separately Britain's vaccine task force chair Kate Bingham said vaccinating everyone in the country for the coronavirus was "not going to happen".

"Only those at risk" need to vaccinate, she said in a Financial Times (FT) interview. "There's going to be no vaccination of people under 18. It's an adult-only vaccine, for people over 50, focusing on health workers and care home workers and the vulnerable.

She told the FT vaccinating healthy people, who are much less likely to have severe outcomes from Covid-19, "could cause them some freak harm".

Britain has had Europe's worst death toll from the virus with the total at over 42,300. Ms Bingham said the government was aiming to vaccinate about 30 million people, out of a population of about 67 million, if a successful vaccine against Covid-19 was found, the FT said. BLOOMBERG,

REUTERS