Tougher tiers when lockdown finishes
THE national lockdown is due to end on December 2 but that doesn’t mean life will go back to normal in many parts of the country.
We’ll be returning to a system of local and regional lockdowns.
And the Government is reviewing how those lockdowns will work.
There will still be three tiers, despite some reports that the Government is considering introducing a “tier four”. But the rules for each tier will change.
The restrictions imposed on people in the new tier three are expected to be tougher than before.
That’s because the existing local lockdown system hasn’t really worked.
Ministers and government scientists say that they saved lives. Fewer people caught coronavirus than would have done if the measures had not been in place.
But they also admit that the virus continued to spread. The number of people infected with coronavirus increased.
Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Office, made this clear when he spoke to MPS recently.
He referred to the reproduction rate of the virus, known as the R rate. This shows how many people will catch the virus for each person currently infected.
If R is 1.3 then 13 people will catch the virus for every ten people that already have it. If R is 0.9 then nine people will catch the virus for every 10 people that have it.
The virus will grow unless R is reduced to one or less. And Prof Whitty said R was higher than this in every part of the country, despite the local lockdowns.
He said: “The only part of the country where at the moment I think where there is realistic evidence that the numbers have flattened, where the R is approaching one, is probably in terms of region is the North East.” Even in the North East, R is still just above one, he said.
It means that tougher measures will be needed in order to prevent a repeat of what happened last time a national lockdown ended – and the virus simply started spreading again.
Of course, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Not only is the Pfizer vaccine looking promising, but other potential vaccines are well on the way to development.
Boris Johnson and other government ministers have been keen to stress that we’re not out of the woods yet.
They don’t want people to think they can start ignoring the current rules. They also know that it could be months before a vaccine is actually available – and that it’s still not quite certain there will be a vaccine at all.
At the same time, the NHS is preparing to start providing a vaccine as soon as next month, not because there’s any guarantee it will be ready as soon as that, but because it’s a real possibility.
The Sunderland Nightingale hospital (actually in Washington) is expected to become a major vaccination centre.
And this coming week, NHS managers will set out detailed plans of how they plan to administer millions of jabs, once the time comes.
It’s not over but there is an end in sight.