The UK reported 51,899 more Covid infections on Thursday as Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the country is seeing “the other side of the Omicron wave”.
There were 183 deaths reported within 28 days of a positive Covid test, bringing the UK’s overall death toll to 160,221.
Separate figures in the Office for National Statistics show there have been 183,000 deaths registered in the UK where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate. These figures now include deaths in England following possible re-infections of Covid.
All the indicators on Covid continue to point in the right direction, with infections down 27 per cent week-on-week, deaths down 26 per cent and hospital admissions down 14 per cent.
Boris Johnson is on Monday expected to announce the government’s plans to end the last Covid restrictions in England including the legal duty to self-isolate.
Also, £500 payments to isolate at home for people on low incomes looks like it is set to end.
It comes as healthy children aged five to 11 across the UK are to be offered a vaccine against coronavirus.
Professor Anthony Harnden, a member of the Joint Committee of Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said offering a low-dose Covid jab to aged five to 11 was a “precautionary approach” to protecting youngsters against future variants.
He told the BBC’s Today Programme: “We do believe that it’s important to future-proof children and actually giving parents the choice of an offer of vaccine, even though a considerable number of them will have already been exposed to Covid, will give them potential broader immunity moving forward should there be a future wave or a new variant arises.
“This is very much a precautionary approach but we’re not going to push it hard – it is an offer.
“We are giving parents the choice and we’re giving the choice on a non-urgent basis so that they have time to carefully consider their decision if their child has already been exposed to Covid.”
The PA news agency asked Mr Javid if there will be a dedicated urgent and emergency care recovery plan, as called for by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
He replied: “There is a plan for urgent and emergency care. Just at the start of this winter, we published a 10-point plan with hundreds of millions of extra funding going into the NHS and social care to help with that winter pressure.
“I think people could see especially over the last couple of months because of Omicron, which had rightly become the priority, that’s had additional pressure on the NHS.
“But it’s right now that we are seeing the other side of the Omicron wave, that things are improving, hospitalisations are falling, that the NHS is doing all that it can to deal with that Covid backlog.”
