Coronavirus UK: London’s usually bustling streets are seen deserted on Saturday night

London was a ghost town last night as closed pubs and restaurants kept the usually busy city centre deserted.

The UK capital, home to 10 million people, was packed with revellers in Soho and Borough Market in Southwark marking Halloween last weekend by going out for drinks with friends.

But last night the fog-covered city was eerily quiet after a week which saw England plunged into a four-week shutdown that forced the closure of licensed premises across the country. 

The images come amid warnings that the country needed ‘dramatic action’ to reduce Covid-19 transmission, despite the Government’s ‘ghastly’ presentation of data to justify the latest lockdown.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter said it would not be sustainable for the NHS to deal with the levels of cases and hospitalisations without tougher measures than those imposed under the three-tier system.

But other scientists have undermined the rationale for shutdown, arguing that the second wave of coronavirus infections has already passed and that the R rate is currently at 1.

Last week, NHS boss Sir Simon Stevens claimed that the shutdown was necessary to prevent hospitals from being overrun during the second wave. But his claims have been questioned by rebel Conservatives who have demonstrated that official projections of 4,000 deaths a day by Christmas were wrong.

Others compared chief medical officer Chris Whitty and science chief Sir Patrick Vallance’s ‘dodgy’ doomsday graphs to the ‘dodgy dossier’ which took Britain to war in Iraq in 2002-03.