CREWE and the rest of Cheshire East spent less than a week under tier four restrictions as a new national lockdown was put in place from midnight tonight (Monday).

In his address this evening, Boris Johnson described how the nation is "entering the last phase of the struggle" against coronavirus as the Prime Minister emphasised the gloom should be tempered by the hope in the mass roll-out of jabs made possible by the flexibility of the new Oxford/AztraZeneca vaccine.

With Covid-19 cases surging due to new variant, the PM instructed people to stay at home unless shopping for food and essentials, to exercise, to seek medical existence or to escape from domestic abuse.

While, again, the message loud and clear is that people should only go to work if they cannot do it from home.

But an apparent climbdown on the government's weekend stance - and one of the main changes for tier four areas - will see all schools move to remote learning from tomorrow (Tuesday) apart from where they need to provide one-to-one education for vulnerable children and key workers.

Exams in the summer will be cancelled and are to replaced with different assessments.

The PM hopes that schools can open after the February half-term. At the weekend he had advised parents to send their children to primary schools on Monday if they were open and added there was "no doubt in my mind that schools are safe".

Tonight he described schools as "vectors for transmission", causing the virus to spread between households, but added that children are still very unlikely to be severely affected even by the new variant of Covid.

The PM also stressed the importance of the vaccine and said the government aims to vaccinate the most vulnerable by mid February.

There has been some local reaction to the national announcement.

Crewe and Nantwich MP Kieran Mullan said: "This should hopefully be our final stretch of beating this virus. But the new strain is up to 80 per cent more infective and is spreading rapidly."

Earlier today local teaching staff, along with a number of Cheshire East Labour/Crewe Town councillors sent an open letter urging Cheshire East Council's education chiefs to close all schools locally.

One signatory, Connor Naismith, Labour's candidate for the council's vacant Crewe West ward said: "I want to say well done to the trade unions and most importantly the thousands of teachers and families who spoke up on this issue when it was difficult to do so.

"The fact is that the PM made this announcement with no new information than he had in December. He could have eased anxiety greatly by acting sooner but, as has become the pattern, he dithered and delayed until the last moment leaving little room to plan for the restrictions."

Meanwhile, a familiar social media voice against the lockdown strategy, former Cheshire East councillor Brian Silvester, tweeted: "Boris promised MPs he wouldn't ramp up lockdowns further without their approval. MPs are being taken for fools. They're not back in work for another week.