KENT, England — A driver and three passengers were fined heavily by the Kent Police after breaking Covid-19 lockdown guidelines during an incident reported in the wee hours of Feb. 15.
The incident took place in Dock Road, Chatham, Kent in England. During the interrogation, the driver informed the police that the occupants were his family and friends. They all lived together.
However, after an inquiry by one of the police officials, the passengers uttered their real addresses, which turned out to be all different.
“One of them is my girlfriend. I do not live with her and picked her up for Valentine’s Day,” said the driver.
The driver confessed that he was taking all of them to his place at Gillingham.
The police officials noticed that none of the passengers in the vehicles were wearing face masks. All four of them were issued fines for breaching Covid-19 restrictions.
“It is not yet time to act like lockdown restrictions have been lifted, and we will take action against those who continue to ignore the regulations and behave selfishly,” said Claire Nix, assistant chief constable of Kent Police. “Whilst I understand that people simply want to socialize, if everyone breached the restrictions, we could find ourselves in a dire situation.”
As per a report by Kent Resilience Forum, during the pandemic, the UK government defined the Covid-19 outbreak as two or more test confirmed cases of the infection among individuals associated with a specific non-residential setting with illness onset dates within 14 days.
Another 70 people were also fined during the weekends, Feb. 13 and Feb. 14, which took the total number of fines for February to 419. The total number of fined cases for this year brings to 1,392.
In another incident, six men and four women were fined when police officers visited a property at Greenhithe, where a party was taking place. As per the group, they rented the place to have a “blowout.”
Another such incident took place on Maison Dieu Road in Dover, where five people who lied about living together were charged against breaking the Covid-19 restrictions, said the Kent Police.
A total of 1,783 people overall have been fined since the restrictive measures were enforced in March, last year.
Kent County Council updated that in the week of Feb. 15, Government will announce the results of the first “review point” of the ongoing lockdown restrictions. At present, the Government will make a judgment on the impact of the Covid-19 vaccine.
The government will be looking “a bit more about the timetable” for vaccinating everyone over the age of 50 and the priorities thereafter.
(Edited by Bornika Das and Vaibhav Vishwanath Pawar.)
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