Lockdown lifting a ‘long, long, long way’ off: Hancock

LONDON Health Secretary Matt Hancock has warned the government is a “long, long, long way” from being able to lift coronavirus lockdown restrictions in England.

Hancock said there was evidence that restrictions in place were having an impact while the vaccination programme was making “brilliant progress”. Three quarters of all those over 80 in the UK had now been vaccinated, with a similar number of those in care homes, he said.However, Hancock said that case numbers were “incredibly high” and the NHS remained under intense pressure.

“There is early evidence that the lockdown is starting to bring cases down but we are a long, long, long way from being low enough because the case rate was incredibly high,” he told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme. “You can see the pressure on the NHS – you can see it every day.”

Hancock said that while he hoped schools in England could reopen by Easter, it would depend on the levels of infection in the community at that time. “We have got to look at the data, we have got to look at the impact of the vaccination programme,” he said.

“The Education Secretary (Gavin Williamson) has said that we will ensure schools get two weeks’ notice of return. I don’t know whether it will be then or before then. We have got to watch the data.”

The Health Secretary said he had a “high degree of confidence” that lockdown restrictions would eventually be lifted in time for the summer.“I hope we have a great British summer. The number of cases are starting to come down but there’s a long time between now and then,” he told Times Radio.

Following the emergence of new variants of the virus in Brazil and South Africa which may be less susceptible to the vaccines, Hancock said the government would adopt a “precautionary” approach to protecting the UK’s border.

Ministers are expected to meet this week to discuss a proposal to require people arriving in the UK to pay to quarantine in a designated hotel to ensure they are following the rules on self-isolating.

Meanwhile, the deputy chief medical officer for England, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, has called on those people who have been vaccinated to keep following the rules on social distancing.

The latest government figures showed the number receiving the first dose of the vaccine across the UK has passed 5.8 million, with a record 478,248 getting the jab in a single day.

However, writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Prof Van-Tam said it was still not known if people who had received the jab could still pass on the virus to others, even though they were protected from falling ill themselves. A further 32 vaccine sites are set to open across the country this week including one at the museum made famous as the set of hit TV series Peaky Blinders. The sites include the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, which featured in the long-running TV show, a racecourse, a football stadium and a former Ikea store.

The British Medical Association has written to the chief medical officer for England urging a rethink, saying that in the case of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine a maximum gap of six weeks had been mandated by the World Heath Organisation (WHO).