Mr Gove told BBC Breakfast that there was evidence the 22:00 closing time has a “beneficial effect” on the spread of the virus in areas where the restriction has already been tried.
He denied the government was wrong to relax coronavirus measures against the virus in the summer, describing the new restrictions as a “recalibration which we hope and believe will be enough to check the spread”.
“We’re not going back to the sorts of measures that we had in the spring,” he said.
“If people can work from home they should”, he added. “But I stress that it’s very important that those people whose jobs require them to be in a specific workplace do so.”
Mr Gove said plans for sport with live audiences to return from 1 October were being halted “for the moment” because of the risk of fans mixing on the way to the stadium or during half-time.
Prof Calum Semple, an expert in outbreak medicine at the University of Liverpool, told BBC Breakfast current data was “tracking the worst-case scenario quite accurately”.
He said there was now a rise in hospital admissions, including among women aged 20 to 40, who were at risk of exposure to the virus because of their work in hospitality, caring roles or because they were parents of schoolchildren.
The UK needed “quite a lot more” restrictions in place to prevent the spread, and the hospitality industry will probably have to take another “hit”, Prof Semple said.
“A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used to make things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.
“The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies.”
Every Defense contractor and corporation has seen bailouts for the pandemic as a veritable windfall of free money, none of it used for the protection of people.
When the 14-year-old African American boy Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, one cartoonist responded in a single-panel comic. It showed one black girl telling another: “I don’t want to seem touchy on the subject… but that new little white tea-kettle just whistled at me!” …
