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When will the prime minister lift the blockade? It is due to set its road map on February 22 and there is some clamor for a firm commitment.
However, frustratingly, the most likely answer is: it depends.
It depends, first of all, on what you mean by blocking.
The lock is not a binary state: you are neither inside nor outside of it. Before deciding when to ease restrictions, the prime minister must know how to ease them.
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Will the ‘worry variant’ affect the lockdown?
There is broad agreement inside and outside the government that schools should return as soon as possible, so this is almost certainly the first area where lockdown rules are relaxed.
After that, you can imagine nonessential shops could make a comeback, along with museums, libraries, and sporting events.
Perhaps then the reopening of restaurants and cafes could be allowed, as happened in the first wave.
However, this decision is not easy. What makes it difficult is that we still don’t know for sure what effect reopening a sector will have on the outbreak.
It has been said, for example, that the opening of schools will increase the R number by 0.5.
The evidence is incomplete, but cannot be completely ruled out: even if children do not significantly increase transmission, their return to school could send more parents to work and therefore increase infections that way.
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We have limited information to continue and what we do have does not always incorporate the effect of the new, more transmissible variant.
That’s why government scientists say it’s crucial to approach the reopening with caution. They want the prime minister to ease restrictions in stages, pausing each time to gauge the effect of the change.
One idea that you circulated, I understand, is to reopen the schools in mid-March, two weeks before the fifteen-day Easter break.
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When will England’s blockade end?
Looking at the data from that would allow scientists to see if it was safe to bring the students back on a more permanent basis over the summer.
Could gyms or soccer games be reopened in the same staggered fashion? It’s hard to imagine, but that’s what scientists would prefer.
The complications become even more difficult once you start trying to figure out when these restrictions should be lifted. Once again, it depends: this time on the criteria that the prime minister will use to make his decision.
Some Conservative MPs have suggested that hospitals should provide the crucial measures. According to the latest figures, there are still more than 25,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19But that number is decreasing at a certain rate. Could it fall fast enough to reopen the economy in mid-March?
Government scientists warn that if he followed this advice, then Mr. Johnson would be playing with fire. Not enough people have been vaccinated, they say, to provide the population with widespread protection against COVID-19.
If the blockage were lifted at once, infections would return directly to their previous level, inevitably followed by hospital admissions. Before long, we would be back on lockdown for the fourth time.
With this in mind, it might make sense to introduce another criterion: the number of people who have received a dose of the coronavirus vaccine.
Israel, the country with the fastest vaccination program in the world, has followed this route.
According to the Times of Israel, it will reopen street shops, gyms, cultural and sporting events when various conditions are met. One is that at least three million Israelis have received their second vaccine. The other is that at least 90 percent of those over 50 are vaccinated.
If all goes according to plan, some parts of the Israeli economy should be ready to open by February 23. In the UK, however, reaching those milestones would take much longer, because the government’s single-dose strategy has delayed the number of people receiving full protection from the vaccine.
An analysis by The Telegraph found that if the UK applied the same reopening criteria as Israel, then non-essential stores would have to wait until the end of May to reopen, while cafes and restaurants would be closed until June.
If the UK were to open up based solely on single dose coverage, then it would be possible to lift the restrictions in March, but there is very little data to help scientists see if that would make sense. Politically, and morally, it would be a great risk.
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To make the prime minister’s decision even more difficult, there is another complicating factor: the risk of new variants.
Even if hospital admissions decline, if infections remain high, there is a danger that a partially vaccine-resistant strain will spread through the population. Once more people are vaccinated, there is also a risk that pressure on the virus will push it into even more deadly forms.
For this reason, scientists are urging the prime minister to take the reopening very, very slowly. They want cases to be as low as possible before the restrictions were loosened – perhaps even lower than it was when the first lockdown was lifted.
Unfortunately, the latest data from the ONS suggests that the percentage of people with the virus is still much higher than in June and July.
If the prime minister follows this advice, we will spend much more time at home.
