UK faces third lockdown as surge in cases threatens to overwhelm hospitals

The UK government is back in crisis mode with new virus cases exceeding 50,000 a day

Boris Johnson’s government is on the brink of another pandemic U-turn with a third national lockdown looking increasingly inevitable.

A surge in infections threatens to overwhelm hospitals and throws his plan to get English children back into classrooms into disarray on a day the British prime minister had hoped to celebrate the delivery of the first shots of a Covid-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca Plc.

Instead the government is back in crisis mode, with new virus cases exceeding 50,000 a day and hospital admissions soaring past the peak of the first wave in April. Johnson,