Boris Johnson has said he hopes the UK will be able to relax Covid restrictions before April, so long as the tier system and vaccines help ‘drive down the virus’.
Speaking to ITV’s Robert Peston, the Prime Minister was asked how long people would be living under the current restrictions sweeping the country. Around three-quarters of England will be in tier four as of New Year’s Eve, it was revealed today.
In response, Johnson said: ‘That will depend on how fast we can get the virus under control, with tough tiering, with testing and with rolling out the vaccination programme.
‘I am not going to give a deadline, but you’ve heard what I’ve said about April, that is the terminus ante quem, if, and it’s a big if, the tiering can work to bring the virus under control.
‘If the vaccine rollout proceeds fast enough and we are able to inoculate, to protect those millions talked about, those vulnerable groups, then there is a world in which that date can be brought forward by who knows how many weeks. But that’s obviously what we’re aiming for.’
Johnson also stated that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which has now been approved, will be rolled out across the country as quickly as possible. AstraZeneca has already said it could produce two million doses of the vaccine a week.
However, the PM refused to ‘get into numbers’ on how many jabs could take place, stating only that they would ‘continue to accelerate and roll it out as fast as we can’.
It comes as the UK recorded a further 50,023 new Covid cases today, while 981 deaths with the virus were reported. It is the highest daily death toll since April 24.
When asked if the government would be keeping schools open amid concerns over a new mutated strain of the virus, Johnson said keeping children in the classroom remained a ‘priority’.
He went on: ‘The pressure of the variant will make it more challenging for us to get kids back into school, although that is and remains the highest priority for the country.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
