UPDATE - COVID-19 outbreak to worsen: British prime minister

By Hasan Esen and Karim El-Bar

LONDON (AA) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will send every household in the country a letter to warn that the coronavirus outbreak is likely to worsen, the government said in a statement Sunday.

The letter comes as pressure grows from inside and outside his own party for mass testing to implemented across the country in order to ease the lockdown sooner.

"It's important for me to level with you -- we know things will get worse before they get better. But we are making the right preparations, and the more we all follow the rules, the fewer lives will be lost and the sooner life can return to normal," Johnson said in the letter, which will be sent to 30 million households across the U.K. this week.

Stressing that the country has sought to institute the right measures at the right time from the beginning of the outbreak, he said: "We will not hesitate to go further if that is what the scientific and medical advice tells us we must do."

"We must slow the spread of the disease, and reduce the number of people needing hospital treatment in order to save as many lives as possible," he said, urging people to stay at home, to ease the burden of the National Health Service (NHS) and save lives.

On Friday, Johnson, 55, tested positive for the coronavirus and began self-isolating.

The death toll in the U.K. has reached 1,019, while the number of confirmed cases is 17,312.

- Calls for mass testing

Jeremy Hunt is Britain’s longest-serving health secretary, appointed under former prime minister David Cameron.

He was a top candidate for the leadership of the ruling Conservatives, and in turn prime minister of the U.K., in last year’s internal party election to replace then-prime minister Theresa May.

Hunt lost out to Boris Johnson, and is now the head of parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee.

In that capacity, he has at time criticized the government’s approach to the coronavirus outbreak. At the start of the crisis, he expressed his opposition to the idea of ‘herd immunity’, which critics accused the government of initially pursuing.

Hunt called for a strict lockdown as other countries in Asia and Europe had done, and welcomed the decision when it came.

In an article for the Sunday Telegraph, Hunt again went on the offensive – this time arguing that the government must go further faster with regards to mass testing in order to hasten the end of the lockdown.

He highlighted the examples of Germany and South Korea in particular; the former has carried out four times as many tests as the U.K. and the latter was the hardest-hit country outside of China, but has since brought the outbreak under control through extensive testing.

“The restaurants are open in South Korea. You can go shopping in Taiwan. Offices are open in Singapore. These countries learned the hard way how to deal with a pandemic after the deadly SARS virus. They now show us how we can emerge from lockdown,” he wrote.

“Mass social distancing should protect the NHS through the peak over the next few weeks, but it's a blunt instrument with massive economic impact,” he said. “For the next wave we must use the precision scalpel of mass testing.”

“Where you find it, you can isolate and contain it,” Hunt wrote.

"And where you don’t, vital services continue to function. With mass testing, accompanied by rigorous tracing of every person a COVID-19 patient has been in touch with, you can break the chain of transmission."

Former prime minister Tony Blair, speaking on Sky News, agreed with Hunt’s proposal.

"It is all about getting to mass testing as fast as possible, because we have to know who has the disease and who has had the disease in order to get the lockdown eased and get people back to work and get some semblance of normality back into our daily lives," he said.

Data compiled by the U.S.-based Johns Hopkins University shows worldwide infections nearly 680,000 mark with over 31,700 deaths. More than 145,600 have recovered from infections.

After first appearing in Wuhan, China in December, the virus has spread to 177 countries and regions.