A million people in the UK are currently infected with the Covid virus and one in fifty people have the virus with higher infection in some areas of the country.
Giving his Downing Street Press Conference alongside Prof Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, Boris Johnson said that more than 650,000 people over 80 have been vaccinated. That is 23% of all people over the age of 80.
That means within two or three weeks a quarter of that group will have a significant degree of immunity he added.
Johnson said that 1.3 million people had been vaccinated already in the UK and that figure figure would reach 2m next week commiting to 13 million people over the next six weeks.
He said that he wished to give the British people the maximum amount of transparency possible with regards to the vaccine and they would be updated daily from next week.
“Obviously everybody wants to be sure that the Government is using every second of this lockdown” to put that invisible shield around the elderly and the vulnerable in the form of vaccination to begin to bring this crisis to an end,
Chris Whitty, introducing a series of slides said that death are lower now than in the first wave, partly because doctors are getting better at keeping people alive now, and partly because the people who have been getting infected have been younger than in the first wave.Buit he added that rates were bound to go up
Johnson said that if the rollout goes according to plan, if the vaccine works as expected, and if people follow the guidance, then by the middle of February, when the top four categories will have been vaccinate, “then there really is the prospect of relaxing some of these measures”.
