No plan for ‘blanket ban’ on elderly leaving home as coronavirus lockdown eases, Matt Hancock says

Matt Hancock dismissed claims there would be a 'blanket ban' on the elderly leaving home as the coronavirus lockdown eases
PA
Imogen Braddick3 May 2020

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has dismissed reports that there could be a "blanket ban" on over 70s leaving home when lockdown is eased.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, British Medical Association council chair, said a “blanket ban” would be “unacceptable”.

"Any proposal to impose stricter social distancing for those at higher risk – essentially quarantining – based solely on age would be both unethical and illegal," he said.

Mr Hancock responded to the reports on Twitter
via REUTERS

After the Sunday Times reported the BMA’s call under the headline ‘Set free healthy over-seventies, say doctors’, Mr Hancock posted on Twitter: “We have strongly advised all over 70s to follow social distancing measures.

“However, there is no ‘blanket ban’, and the suggestion that the clinically vulnerable “include ‘people aged 70 or older regardless of medical conditions'” is wrong and deeply misleading.”

It appears to contradict advice issued on the Government website which says that "clinically vulnerable people include anyone aged 70 or over, as well as those under 70 with an underlying health condition".

But, when contacted on Sunday, the Department of Health and Social Care said that the over 70s "are not included in the most at risk group (extremely clinically vulnerable), who have been told to isolate for 12 weeks”.

It comes as NHS England’s national medical director Professor Stephen Powis said on Friday that officials will be studying whether stricter measures will or will not have to continue to apply to the elderly when the lockdown is eased.

He said: “The over-70s can be absolutely fit and healthy, it’s not the case that everybody over 70 has a chronic health condition or underlying disease.

“As we look forward…I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question to say how would that work in age groups and age bands?

“Although we do know that complications and unfortunately deaths are more common in the elderly even without complications, I think that’s for consideration and that’s work that we will need to do as we move forward.”

Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown

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Any proposal to include the elderly in continuing restrictions regardless of their state of health is likely to trigger fierce resistance.

Former minister Baroness Ros Altmann, 64, said on Sunday that using age-based criteria to lift restrictions would send a message that older people’s lives “don’t count in the same way as others”.

Comedian Sir Michael Palin, 76, agreed in a separate interview that age restrictions would be “very difficult and very wrong and very unfair”.

Speaking to Sky’s Sophy Ridge On Sunday, Baroness Altmann said: “I think using an age-based criteria is fundamentally wrong and would potentially cost the lives of many people, and risk social unrest.”

The life peer said many elderly people have only accepted lockdown conditions “because everyone else has got to do it,” and “lots of them” have said they would “risk going to prison” rather than continue isolating.

She added “nobody would dream” of applying restrictions on the basis of skin colour, despite a higher death rate among BAME people.​

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