Hundreds of shoppers descend on IKEA Leeds as huge queues reported

Shocking pictures show hundreds of shoppers queuing around the building today.

Some took to social media to report traffic delays of up to an hour in Birstall.

Others reported long delays at Home Bargains and other stores across Leeds, with shoppers rushing to stock up before non-essential retail stores are closed.

However, supermarkets will be allowed to stay open during the lockdown.

Under the measures announced, people can only leave home for specific reasons including for education, work if they cannot work from home, for exercise and recreation outdoors, for medical reasons, to escape injury or harm, to shop for food and essentials and to provide care for vulnerable people.

Here is the press conference from Saturday in full:

Good evening and apologies for disturbing your Saturday evening with more news of Covid and I can assure you I wouldn’t do it unless it was absolutely necessary.

First I will hand over to Chris and then Patrick who will present the latest data.

[DATA PRESENTATION]

Thank you very much Patrick, and Chris. I am afraid that no responsible PM can ignore the message of those figures.

When I told you two weeks ago that we were pursuing a local and a regional approach to tackling this virus, I believed then and I still believe passionately that it was the right thing to do.

Because we know the cost of these restrictions, the damage they do, the impact on jobs, and on livelihoods, and on people’s mental health.

No one wants to be imposing these kinds of measures anywhere.

We didn’t want to be shutting businesses, pubs and restaurants in one part of the country, where incidence was very low, when the vast bulk of infections were taking place elsewhere.

Our hope was that by strong local action, strong local leadership, we could get the rates of infection down where the disease was surging, and address the problem thereby across the whole country.

And I want to thank the millions of people who have been putting up with these restrictions in their areas for so long. I want to thank local leaders who have stepped up and local communities.

Because as you can see from some of those charts, the R has been kept lower than it would otherwise have been, and there are signs that your work has been paying off

And we will continue as far as we possibly can to adopt a pragmatic and local approach in the months ahead

But as we’ve also seen from those charts, we’ve got to be humble in the face of nature

And in this country alas as across much of Europe the virus is spreading even faster than the reasonable worst case scenario of our scientific advisers

Whose models as you’ve just seen now suggest that unless we act we could see deaths in this country running at several thousand a day

A peak of mortality alas far bigger than the one we saw in April

Even in the South West, where incidence was so low, and still is so low, it is now clear that current projections mean they will run out of hospital capacity in a matter of weeks unless we act.

And let me explain why the overrunning of the NHS would be a medical and moral disaster beyond the raw loss of life

Because the huge exponential growth in the number of patients – by no means all of them elderly, by the way – would mean that doctors and nurses would be forced to choose which patients to treat

Who would get oxygen and who wouldn’t

Who would live and who would die,

And doctors and nurses would be forced to choose between saving covid patients and non-covid patients

And the sheer weight of covid demand woul