New coronavirus guidelines have made it illegal to have sex in your own home with a person from another household from today. The government is set to lay out the new regulations this morning, which will ban people from socialising indoors with a person from outside your household bubble.
The new regulation reads: ‘No person may participate in a gathering which takes place in a public or private place indoors, and consists of two or more persons.’ Until today, the person who goes inside another person’s home would have been the one breaching the rules. However, now both people could be prosecuted under the new amendment to The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations 2020 bill, which is set to be presented before Parliament on Monday morning.
Previous rules did not include wording about meeting in private places as the general message was to ‘stay at home’ and to avoid all but essential travel. Now only those with ‘reasonable excuses’ will be allowed to meet privately indoors – which does not include meeting up to have sex. Reasonable excuses cover elite athletes, vulnerable people, and key workers. Those that must meet in a private space for childcare, separated parents who live in different households seeing their children, those attending a funeral, and people providing emergency assistance, would also be considered reasonable excuses. It is not yet clear how a person could be prosecuted – and whether they will be fined – if they are found breaching the new laws.
The amendment means that both people will be in breach of the laws from today (Picture: gov.uk) At the beginning of the UK’s lockdown in late March, the government urged couples to move in together or remain apart so they do not keep switching between households and risk spreading the virus. Deputy Chief Medical officer Jenny Harries told the public to urgently ‘make your choice and stick with it,’ meaning many couples who live apart have now not seen each other for more than two months. It comes as a study found six in 10 Britons have gone without having sexual activity during the lockdown, found researchers at the universities of Anglia Ruskin and Ulster, who are analyzing how Covid-19 restrictions are affecting the relationships of almost 900 adults.
Source: Metro UK
