Vaccinations ‘not enough to ease lockdown’ yet
VACCINES are not doing enough “heavy lifting” at the moment and case rates need to drop further before the Government can think of easing restrictions, the UK’s chief scientific adviser has said.
Sir Patrick Vallance said the country still has a long way to go in battling coronavirus – describing scenes in some hospitals as a “war zone” – but added there is “light at the end of the tunnel”.
It comes as calculations by the Press Association show the Government needs to hit an average of 384,000 first doses per day to reach a target of vaccinating 15 million of the most vulnerable by February 15.
New figures released yesterday show the total number of people given first doses in Great Britain now stands at nearly 4.5 million.
The Government has pledged that all those in the top priority groups, including the over-70s and front-line health and social care workers, will have received an offer to have had their first dose of the jab given to them by mid-February.
In a Q&A programme with Sky News viewers, Sir Patrick was asked if the lockdown would be kept in place if infection figures stayed the same or dropped.
“The advice at the moment is vaccines are not going to do the heavy lifting for us at the moment, anywhere near it,” he said.
“This is about, I’m afraid, the restrictive measures which we’re all living under and carrying on with those.
“The numbers are nowhere near where they need to be at the moment, they need to come down quite a lot further – we need to make sure we stick with it.
“You go for a walk in the park or something, life looks normal; you go for a walk in a hospital, if you work in a hospital, you will see life not looking normal at all.
“This is a really difficult, dangerous situation we’re in, and we need to get the numbers down, so I don’t see a release of these measures as being a sensible thing to do in the short term.”
He said it was hoped that, as the vaccine took effect and cases dropped, it would be possible to start a gradual release of some of the measures.
But he warned: “I think it’s important to recognise this is not going to be a sort of big bang, ‘great, take the lid off, everything’s fine, we can all go back to normal’.
“This is going to be a slow release, monitoring carefully, understanding the effects.”
Sir Patrick added that, through the summer and into winter, “things will be a lot better” because a large proportion of the population will have been vaccinated.
But, regarding the current situation in the NHS, he said: “This is very, very bad at the moment, with enormous pressure, and in some cases it looks like a war zone in terms of the things that people are having to deal with.”
In a direct message to the public, Sir Patrick said: “There’s light at the end of the tunnel, science is going to get us out of this, and we’re on the way.
“We need to carry on doing what we’re doing and a big thank you to everybody.
“It’s really tough to keep these restrictions in place, it’s really tough on children, it’s really tough on all of us.
“Please keep going because, if we can keep this under control, if we can drive these numbers down, that’s what’s going to get us out of this sooner.”
Analysis by the Press Association shows Covid-19 case rates in two regions of England are at their lowest level since before Christmas.
In London, the rolling seven-day rate as of January 15 stood at 703.7 cases per 100,000 people – down from 1,053.4 a week earlier, and the lowest since the seven days to December 19.
Eastern England is currently recording a seven-day rate of 526.8, down from 763.5 and the lowest since December 20.
All regions of England are continuing to show a week-on-week fall in sevenday rates, though levels are dropping faster in some areas than others.