UK has ‘long, long, long way’ until lockdown can be lifted

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has warned the government is a “long, long, long way” from being able to lift coronavirus lockdown restrictions in England.

Mr Hancock said there was evidence that restrictions in place were having an impact while the vaccination programme was making “brilliant progress”.

Three-quarters of all those over 80 in the UK had now been vaccinated, with a similar number of those in care homes, he said.

However, Mr Hancock said that case numbers were “incredibly high” and the NHS remained under intense pressure.

“There is early evidence that the lockdown is starting to bring cases down but we are a long, long, long way from being low enough because the case rate was incredibly high,” he told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge On Sunday.

“You can see the pressure on the NHS – you can see it every day.”

Mr Hancock said that while he hoped schools in England could reopen by Easter, it would depend on the levels of infection in the community at that time.

Following the emergence of new variants of the virus in Brazil and South Africa which may be less susceptible to the vaccines, Mr Hancock said the government would adopt a “precautionary” approach to protecting the UK’S border.

Ministers are expected to meet this week to discuss a proposal to require people arriving in the UK to pay to quarantine in a designated hotel to ensure they are following the rules on self-isolating.

Mr Hancock said that so far there were 77 known cases of the South African variant in the UK and nine of the Brazilian.

He said that all the cases of the South African variant were linked to travel.

“There is not what we call community transmission where you find a case that you can’t find the link back to travel. At the moment it is all linked to travel,” he told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show.

He said the new variants had been identified because both Brazil and South Africa had “decent-sized” genomic sequencing programmes but other countries were less well covered.