Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Backsliding on a lockdown end-date has begun already

Will England’s lockdown end on 2 December? Even before this morning’s media round there was good reason to suspect it might not. The first national lockdown – we were originally told – would be for three weeks, with the explicit aim of building more capacity in the National Health Service. But the goalposts shifted and three weeks turned into more than three months: despite daily Covid deaths peaking in April, pubs and restaurants didn’t reopen until early July. Weeks later gyms and other leisure sectors followed, and public transport guidance changed to encourage employees back to their offices.

This morning, half a day after the Prime Minister laid out his four-week timeline for a second lockdown, comments from Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove and Sage advisor Professor Sir Jeremy Farrar have called it into question, both suggesting we could be in for a repeat of lockdown extensions.

First up on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Professor Farrar, Sage committee member and Director of the Wellcome Trust, refused to rule out a longer lockdown, arguing that it would be better to extend the new lockdown up to Christmas to allow a relaxation of the rules then, rather than end lockdown on the proposed date and risk infections rising:

It’s hard to imagine the government lifting lockdown measures while hospitalisations are still on the rise

‘We don’t know what the situation is going to be like in the last week of November and the first week of December. We all hope that four weeks is going to be enough. And we have a better chance of the four weeks being enough if we all do observe and respect the changes that have come in. If we do not see that the transmission in the community and therefore hospitalisations and tragically deaths is not coming below one, it would be much better to extend this lockdown for another couple of weeks, prior to the Christmas period, and then loosen the restrictions a little bit over Christmas so that people can meet up with their families.

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