By Easter we should be travelling again – here’s hoping...

With vaccinations well underway, we can now realistically start making plans for overseas breaks, says Nick Trend

Could we be starting to travel relatively normally and taking overseas holidays again by Easter? It might sound optimistic after so many recent setbacks, but if everything continues to go to plan with vaccination, it’s a reasonable bet.

Here’s why. Our current anxiety is – understandably – wound up by the new coronavirus variant, a soaring infection rate and the commensurate increase in the number of hospital admissions and deaths. These figures are driving the new tier restrictions and also resulted in the latest bans imposed by so many countries on visitors from Britain. So travel – and life generally – is likely to remain highly restricted for some weeks to come.

However, a return to relative normality won’t depend on infection levels but on the hospitalisation and death rates. Even if infections remain high, it would be hard to justify restricting travel and other freedoms if fewer people are needing treatment and even fewer are dying from Covid-19.

Since more than two thirds of coronavirus deaths in this country are in the over-80s (and 92 per cent are over 65) then we should be able to extrapolate in a fairly straightforward way that protecting this cohort will start to make a difference to hospital admissions and deaths.

By Christmas, more than 600,000 people had had the first dose in three weeks, with a target of a million a week by mid-January – and the easier-tomanage Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be rolled out from Monday. So it is reasonable to expect that the majority of the 3.4 million British people aged over 80 will have been vaccinated by the end of the month and for all to have had at least the first jab.

There are issues, of course, with how many doses will be delivered and how efficiently the roll-out will operate. And it isn’t yet known how quickly immunity develops. The NHS says it “takes a few weeks after getting the second

dose for it to work” but a recent article in the New Scientist stated that “protective immunity builds up within four weeks of the first dose” and quoted the chief executive of BioNTech, which co-developed the Pfizer vaccine, claiming it appears to develop earlier than that.

It seems feasible, then, that nearly all the most vulnerable people in Britain – those who account for the vast majority of deaths and hospital admissions – should have meaningful levels of protection by the middle of February. As long as infection levels are kept under control, we should start to see a rapid reduction in the death rate by the beginning of March, with hospital admissions reducing even more quickly.

Surely by then there will be a big uptick in confidence and a growing desire to get back to normal. Those most at risk will have protection, the young will be relatively unconcerned. A week or two in the Mediterranean is bound to be high on many people’s wish list as a

way of celebrating. Of course there are many unknowables.

We can’t be sure how effective the vaccines will be against new strains. And bringing down the death rate in Britain doesn’t necessarily solve the problem for the would-be traveller. If transmission stays high among young people (those in their 20s and 30s aren’t expected to be vaccinated until summer), then some countries may not be so keen on welcoming British visitors. So we are unlikely to see an end to frequent adjustments and sudden changes to the travel corridor arrangements for some months to come and we may need vaccination passports to enable those who do have immunity to travel.

But surely, if the vaccine developers are right and these lifesavers are rolled out on schedule, by the spring we will be back on the road again. And even if we don’t feel ready to rush out and book our holidays immediately, we can at least start making plans.

A trip to Amsterdam would give anyone a spring in their step