Military may intervene as ‘major incident’ declared in Essex
The growing Covid-19 crisis in Essex has prompted calls for emergency measures, including the deployment of the military.
The Essex Resilience Forum (ERF) has declared a ‘major incident’ in the southeast English county and claims the “growing demand” from rising Covid-19 infections was putting “stress on hospitals and social care sittings”.
ERF board member, Anthony McKeever, said the move was a "signal for help" and was directed at the central government in London.
Essex is currently placed in the Tier four of coronavirus rankings (where the highest restrictions apply) and the south of the county in particular has some of the highest coronavirus infections in England.
In the House of Commons on Wednesday (December 30), Tory MP for Harwich and North Essex, Bernard Jenkins, claimed that local officials in Essex were submitting a request for “military assistance” to the Civil Authority.
According to Jenkins, the armed forces are needed to help with the "construction of community hospitals and additional hospital capacity", in addition to helping “staff” those sites.
"They [local officials] would also like armed forces help with the rollout of the vaccine to accelerate that in Essex and to assist with testing in schools", Jenkins added.
In reply to Jenkins’ statement, Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, said he would look "favorably" on the request and acknowledged the county was under "very significant" pressure.
It is not yet clear to what extent (if any) the British military has applied pressure on local officials in Essex to allow it to get involved in the developing county-wide emergency.
If the army is deployed in Essex, it would constitute its fourth major intervention since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
Just over a week ago the army was deployed to ease the crisis in Dover as France closed its border to human traffic from the UK.
Before that, and earlier this month, the army took over the role of transporting the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine from Belgium to the UK in addition to distributing it to the country’s hospital network.
And at the very onset of the pandemic in March the army said it was prepared to intervene if the pandemic triggered social unrest and political crisis.
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