The Prime Minister acknowledged that many people felt “frustrated” - particularly if they were in an area with low infection rates, but said they were essential to get coronavirus down.

“I know it is frustrating for people when they are in a high-tier area when there is very little incidence in their village or their area. I totally understand why people feel frustrated,” he said during a visit to a public health laboratory in Wiltshire in a pooled clip for broadcasters.

He added: “The difficulty is that if you did it any other way, first of all you’d divide the country up into loads and loads of very complicated sub-divisions - there has got to be some simplicity and clarity in the way we do this.

“The second problem is that, alas, our experience is that when a high-incidence area is quite close to a low-incidence area, unless you beat the problem in the high-incidence area, the low-incidence area I’m afraid starts to catch up.”

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