YOU’RE STUCK INDOORS UNTIL SPRING!
Gove signals lockdown won’t be lifted before MARCH
DISMAL Michael Gove has delivered a stark warning that lockdown will only start to be lifted gradually in March.
And that timeline depends on the Government meeting its highly ambitious targets for vaccination.
The Cabinet Office minister yesterday admitted there was no ‘certainty’ that the brutal squeeze imposed by Boris Johnson on England on Monday night will be eased at the end of February as hoped.
The PM set a goal of giving first doses of the vaccine to more than 13 million vulnerable people over the next seven weeks – with doubts already voiced over whether that is possible.
But Mr Gove cautioned that even in the best case scenario not ‘all’ of the curbs will go, as he braced the weary public for a long haul to combat the fast-spreading new variant of coronavirus.
In a round of interviews, Mr Gove said a review of the situation would happen in the February half-term.
“We hope we will be able to progressively lift restrictions after that, but what I can’t do is predict – nobody can predict – with accuracy exactly what we will be able to relax and when,” he told Sky News.
“What we do know is that the more effective our vaccination programme, the more people who are protected in that way, the easier it will be to lift these restrictions.”
Sombre
The heavy caveats came after the PM made another extraordinary U-turn by plunging the country into a March-style lockdown, saying the NHS risked being overrun within weeks if he failed to act.
Just a day after he urged parents to send their children back to school, Mr Johnson declared in a sombre address from No.10 that primary and secondary schools will be shut from today, with only the vulnerable and offspring of key workers allowed to go in.
Nurseries can stay open. But university students are being told to stay at home and study remotely, while GCSE and A-level exams will not go ahead as planned.
Teenagers may not know for weeks how their exams will be replaced, with Ofsted expected to launch a consultation – although government sources said some ‘contingency’ plans had already been considered.