Parents are warned – ‘don’t bend the rules’

PARENTS dropping their children off at school have been warned against bending coronavirus rules as the “next few weeks are going to be crucial” in keeping infections and hospital admissions down.

Infectious disease expert Dr Mike Tildesley said it is “possible” to keep the reproductive number – or R value – of the virus below 1 with schools open, but everyone must continue to follow “all the other rules”.

Schools in England are due to reopen from tomorrow, a move Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said marks the “beginning of the road back to normality”.

Dr Tildesley warned parents: “When you’re dropping your children off you need to maintain social distancing.

“Just because you’re not in the home with your young children, don’t use it as an excuse to go out and mix with other people that you otherwise wouldn’t have done.

“It’s possible with schools open we can keep the R number below 1 but if we are going to achieve that we all need to keep following all the other rules.”

Dr Tildesley said that falling Covid-19 rates are most likely to be due to lockdown measures, and the impact of vaccinations “hopefully is yet to come”.

He said: “I think most of the reason the numbers are going in the right direction now is still due to lockdown.

“I think we haven’t quite seen the impact of vaccinations, probably start to come in round about now and having a little bit of an effect, but most of the effect thus far actually is probably the fact we have been under severe restrictions since the start of January.”

Deaths from coronavirus have fallen by 41% in a week, while hospital admissions have seen their fastest ever fall, the Health Secretary said on Friday.

Matt Hancock said there were still 12,136 people in UK hospitals with Covid-19, which was “too high”, but the seven-day average for the number of new admissions to hospital was 900 – “the lowest since October”.