THE PPE PM
PM SAYS HE CAN’T PROMISE A SUDDEN LIFTING OF LOCKDOWN AS HANCOCK URGES BRITONS: DON’T BLOW IT NOW
BORIS JOHNSON has warned there will be no great ‘open sesame’ moment when curbs on freedoms are lifted.
The UK is still in a ‘pretty precarious position’, the prime minister warned while visiting the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine manufacturing facility.
The process of opening up – which the government hopes can begin in early March – will be gradual, he said.
‘I understand completely that people want to get back to normal as fast as we possibly can,’ Mr Johnson said.
‘It depends on the vaccination programme going well, it depends on there being no new variants that throw our plans out and we have to mitigate against, and it depends on everybody, all of us, remembering that we’re not out of the woods yet.’
He added: ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to warn people it will be gradual, you can’t just open up in a great open sesame, in a great bang, because I’m afraid the situation is still pretty precarious.’
Mr Johnson suggested ‘things will be very different by the spring’ and claimed the UK would be capable of a ‘very powerful economic recovery’ as it emerges from the crisis.
Health secretary Matt Hancock urged Britons to stick to lockdown rules and not ‘blow it now’ as the vaccination campaign makes progress, with more than 4million people having now received a first dose.
Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi told Times Radio that by the ‘first or second week of March’ there should be ‘very clear evidence of a sort of a break in the correlation between infection rates and hospitalisation and obviously death’. But he added that ‘there are a lot of unknowns, we don’t know the impact on transmission of the vaccines yet’.
By January 17, out of a total of 4,514,602 jabs given so far, 4,062,501 were first doses – a rise of 225,407 on the previous day’s figures. A total of 452,301 were second doses, an increase of 2,565 on the previous day.
Latest figures show 599 deaths being reported in the last 24 hours, up from 529 last Monday, and a further 37,535 cases, down from 46,169 last Monday.
The over-70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable are also starting to get their jabs this week.
Meanwhile, the head of the World Health Organization urged countries and manufacturers to spread doses more fairly around the globe. Directorgeneral Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the prospects for equitable distribution were at ‘serious risk’.