The Health Secretary Matt Hancock says it is “still too early” for the Government to make decisions on whether to press ahead with step four of England’s roadmap on June 21.
“The roadmap has always been guided by the data,” he says. “So we’ll assess the data and announce the outcome a week today on June 14.
Hancock told the House of Commons that the so called Indian or Delta variant is 40 per cent more transmissable than the Kent variant, and has made the race between vaccination and variants “tighter”,
Howsever he added that hospitalisations remain mostly “flat” and revealed new data which showed that as of June 3, of the 12,383 cases of Delta variant, 464 went on to prevent at emergency care and 126 people were admitted to hospital – 83 were unvaccinated, 28 had received one dose, and just three had received both doses of vaccine.
As of June 3, of the 12,383 cases of Delta variant, 464 went on to prevent at emergency care and 126 people were admitted to hospital – 83 were unvaccinated, 28 had received one dose, and just three had received both doses of vaccine.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman has told reporters this lunchtime: “There still remains that there is nothing in the data currently to suggest Step 4 can’t go ahead at the earliest date.
“But we do need to look very closely at the data over this coming week, which will be crucial to decide and really to get a sense of the data, particularly on hospitalisations and whether or not the excellent vaccine rollout programme has sufficiently severed that link between the increase in cases, which we always expected to happen, particularly after Step 3, and that subsequently leading to hospitalisations and deaths.”
Earlier today Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the Government and chair of the Independent Sage Group, said the current Covid-19 figures are “evidence of another wave appearing”.
He told Sky News that there were 5,300 new cases of the disease per day in the United Kingdom and we’re up about 2,000 on last week.
“Now we’ve been discussing whether or not we’re going into a serious third wave and I don’t think we can possibly wait any longer.This is the evidence of another wave appearing.”
While Ravi Gupta, a professor of clinical microbiology at University of Cambridge, has said a more cautious approach should be taken but a delay could be “a few more weeks rather than months”.
“I think that to go completely back to normal may not be in everyone’s best interests,” he told BBC Breakfast.
“The views of scientists such as myself and others reflect the fact that we want this to be the last lockdown that we ever go into, and we do not want to go into a reverse situation which would be much more damaging to the economy, people’s businesses and long-term welfare.”
He said once the virus has been suppressed and around 80% of people have been vaccinated then we can look at fully reopening society.
“We are in a situation where we could obtain huge gains just by a little bit more work,”
