Barely a year has passed since Rishi Sunak’s first Budget. Its centrepiece was a £30 billion stimulus designed to calm nerves about Covid-19 even though barely 500 cases had been diagnosed in the country. The Commons chamber was packed, with not a mask in sight. Few that day would have thought that in a year’s time the country would be in its third national lockdown and the economy would have suffered its worst slump since the Great Frost of 1709.
The pandemic has made a mockery of nearly every optimistic prediction. The government is now moving with extreme caution. Even though vaccines have a greater effect with every passing day, restrictions won’t finally be removed until 21 June. The furlough scheme, which has cost £54 billion so far, has been extended until the end of September. The length of this shows both government nervousness about the pace of easing restrictions and fear about how taking away support quickly could lead to a spike in sackings. Mass unemployment is one of the biggest risks this country faces when the pandemic is over.
Science is winning the fight against the virus, though. Vaccines are proving more effective than predicted: one dose of either Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech cuts the risk of hospitalisation in the over-eighties by 80 per cent. Given that deaths among the over-seventies account for more than 80 per cent of all Covid-19 fatalities in England and Wales, this severely limits the potential for a deadly third wave.
Take-up of the vaccine has also been extremely high so far. In Whitehall there is hope that 90 per cent of adults will get jabbed. This gives grounds for optimism that nearly all social distancing measures may be able to go on 21 June.
There will be a political fight about this.
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