England is set to find out the plan for ending the last remaining Covid-19 restrictions when the Prime Minister addresses the country this evening.
Boris Johnson's Cabinet will meet on Monday morning to finalise the " Living with Covid " blueprint before leading a press conference from Downing Street, expected to be this evening.
Self-isolation laws and the end or changes to the free Covid-19 testing system are expected to be discussed. Westminster makes the policies for England, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland's devolved governments set their own.
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Mr Johnson's Living with Covid proposal will focus on “finally giving people back their freedom” after “one of the most difficult periods in our country’s history”, the Prime Minister has said.
The legal requirement to self-isolate after testing positive for Covid could be scrapped as early as Thursday, The Mail On Sunday reported.
The Prime Minister will set out a timetable for scaling back free coronavirus tests – although it is expected they will be retained for older and more vulnerable people.
What time is Boris Johnson's speech on Living with Covid?
Mr Johnson is due to meet his Cabinet on Monday morning, before making an announcement in Parliament at around 2.30pm.
The live press conference is set for this "evening", Press Association reports. That would indicate a start time of around 5pm - 6pm, as has been the case for the Prime Minister's live press conference during the coronavirus pandemic, although final timings have yet to be confirmed.
Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the UK has a “wall of immunity now” thanks to the vaccines “but the decision about when and how to reduce restrictions is enormously difficult”.
He said the benefits of restrictions are obvious in “reducing chains of transmission, the risks of people getting infected, the burden on the health system”, but the harms of restrictions are harder to assess.
“They include things, just from a health perspective, like the the impact on hospitals of having staff self-isolating, the inability to perform operations, there will be surgery cancelled today that may be critical for people because of staff who are off work during that period; the impact on education, on the workplace and the economy.
“The impacts on the economy and mental health will have longer-term consequences. So if we could find a measure that brings all of that together, we could work out the exact right moment (for lifting restrictions).”
Sir Andrew said “there isn’t a right or wrong answer to this because we don’t have a measure that helps us get there”.
Business minister Paul Scully said it will be down to empoloyers and employees to make self-isolation decisions.
He told Sky News: “I would say that it’s like any illness, frankly, any transmissible illness that you would say stay at home.”
He said if an employee had flu, they would be expected to stay at home, “but it’ll be down to themselves or down to their employer”.
Asked what action employees should take if their employers tried to force them in if they were ill with Covid, Mr Scully said: “This is why we need to make sure that we’ve got really good guidance for employers.
“But as I say, there will come a time when the pandemic moves to more of an endemic approach to Covid, in the same way that flu and other viruses are treated, and that’s what we’ve got to get back to.
“But it’s a fine balance, clearly, and that’s why Cabinet’s meeting this morning, to go through the science, to go through that balance and debate it and then, obviously, the Prime Minister (will) come before Parliament to make his announcement.”
The Government has moved to “abdicate its own responsibility for looking after its population”, said Professor Robert West, a health psychologist from University College London and a member of the Scientific Pandemic Insights group on Behaviours (Spi-B) which feeds into Sage
Speaking in a personal capacity, he said one in 20 people currently has Covid-19 and 150 people are dying each day.
“It looks as though what the Government has said is that it accepts that the country is going to have to live with somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 Covid deaths a year and isn’t really going to do anything about it,” he said. “Now that seems to me to be irresponsible.”
He added that there are a “large number of deaths from heart disease and cancer but we don’t just say ‘Well, we’ve got to live with it’.
“We do an awful lot with heart disease and cancer and other forms of deaths to try to prevent them and to treat them, and so it seems a little odd really to be saying ‘Well, Covid, we’re going to treat that differently. We’re not going to try and prevent it’.”
Prof West said he would be “very surprised” if scrapping rules is cost-saving, given the costs of hospital admissions, and the impact of things like long Covid on the economy.
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