UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged people to "stay at home" as he announced a fresh lockdown for England, a few hours after First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced a strict lockdown for Scotland.

Johnson, in a televised address, said schools would close for all apart from vulnerable pupils or the children of key workers and he said people would be legally obliged to stay at home except limited exceptions such as shopping for essentials, daily exercise and for medical reasons.

People should work from home if possible, Johnson said, adding that the action was needed to stop the National Health Service being overwhelmed. The number of infections and the numbers of COVID-19 patients in hospital have hit fresh highs over the past week.

"As I speak to you tonight, our hospitals are under more pressure from COVID than any time since the start of the pandemic. With most of the country already under extreme measures, it's clear that we need to do more together to bring this new variant under control.

"We must therefore go into a national lockdown, which is tough enough to contain this variant. That means the government is once again instructing you to stay at home."

He said that if the timetable of the vaccination program went as planned and the number of cases and deaths responded to the lockdown measures as expected, it should be possible to start moving out of lockdown by the middle of February.

Earlier on Monday Scotland had also imposed its most stringent COVID-19 lockdown since last March.

The UK's component nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each implement their own COVID-19 responses, although they are increasingly trying to coordinate their actions and responses – especially because of the new variant of the coronavirus, which is thought to be more transmissible. 

Nicola Sturgeon said the new variant accounted for nearly half of new cases in Scotland and was 70 percent more transmissible. Scots, she said, would be legally required to stay at home for January from midnight. Schools will close for all but the children of essential workers.

"We have decided to introduce from midnight, for the duration of January, a legal requirement to stay at home, except for essential purposes," Sturgeon told the Scottish Parliament.

"As a result of this new variant, [the virus] has just learned to run much faster and has most definitely picked up pace in the past couple of weeks. It is no exaggeration to say that I am more concerned about the situation that we face now than I have been at any time since March."

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Northern Ireland is now in the second week of a six-week lockdown, while Wales is due a review of its own Level 4 lockdowns this week. First Minister Mark Drakeford has warned there is not "much headroom for change."

Second vaccine

The developments come on a day that started brightly for British hopes of conquering the COVID-19 pandemic. At 7.30 a.m. an 82-year-old dialysis patient called Brian Pinker became the first person in the world to be given the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine outside a trial. 

"I am so pleased to be getting the COVID-19 vaccine today and really proud that it is one that was invented in Oxford," said Pinker, a retired maintenance manager, just a few hundred meters from where the vaccine was developed.

Britain, grappling with the world's sixth-worst death toll and one of the worst economic hits from the pandemic, had also been the first country to roll out the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Germany's BioNTech just under a month ago, and Health Minister Matt Hancock hailed the introduction of a second option. 

"We obviously have the very positive news this morning of the Oxford vaccine starting to be rolled out," he said. "That's a triumph of British science that we've managed to get where we are."

The UK is prioritizing getting a first dose of a vaccine to as many people as possible over giving second doses, despite some doctors and scientists expressing concern. New variants of the coronavirus are complicating the COVID-19 response, especially amid uncertainty as to whether existing vaccines will be as effective against them.