What will the government’s roadmap out of lockdown look like? That’s a question being asked frequently as ministers get to work on a plan for easing restrictions. Given that Boris Johnson isn’t due to announce the details until next Monday, it’s a moving picture — with new data continuing to inform the proposals. Speculation aside, the Prime Minister spoke in a broadcast interview today over his strategy for easing the lockdown.
Johnson said that he would be pushing for a ‘cautious but irreversible’ approach — in the hope that a cautious approach would mean that a fourth lockdown was avoided. He said that where possible the government would give dates for the various stages of reopening — but would also reserve the rights to push these back if the data coming in warranted it.
The most illuminating part of the interview was about how the government views living with Covid in the long term. With the Covid Recovery Group calling for all legislative restrictions to go by May once the over-50s are vaccinated, Johnson was asked by Sky’s Sam Coates whether he believed it could be treated like flu and allowed to let rip through 20 to 40-somethings. It comes as Matt Hancock suggested over the weekend that Covid could eventually be treated like seasonal flu.
Johnson appeared less sure — citing new variants as a reason why it’s important to get the virus rates to very low levels:
If you have a large volume of circulation — if you have loads of people, even young people, getting the disease then a couple of things happen.First of all you have a higher risk of new variants, mutations within the population where the disease is circulating. Secondly there will be a greater risk of the disease spreading out into the older groups again. Although the vaccines are effective and great, of course, no vaccination programme is 100 per cent effective.
While the Prime Minister did not go into the specifics of how long he expected this to be a risk for, his comments suggest that No. 10’s thinking on living with the virus is rather different to the approach favoured by many Tory MPs.
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