Life could be ‘much closer to normal’ by late spring if Covid vaccine target met, says minister George Eustice

‘There is light at the end of the tunnel’
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People could see life start to return to “much closer to normal” by late spring or early summer if the roll-out of Covid-19 jabs happens as planned, a Cabinet minister has said. 

Environment Secretary George Eustice outlined how, by spring, the country could “start to turn the corner” once around 15 million people in the four top vaccination priority groups have been offered the jab and it is giving them protection from the disease.

With confirmed Covid cases falling in London and other areas, Mr Eustice gave the clearest picture yet of how lockdown could be eased.

He told Sky News: “Our aim is to vaccinate all of those vulnerable cohorts, the over 70s, by the middle of February.

“If we can get to that position, then by the spring we can start to turn the corner because we will have vaccinated all of the vulnerable people that are most at risk.

He continued: “There is light at the end of the tunnel.

“Once we get all of those vulnerable cohorts vaccinated and start to move down the age ranges, in late spring early summer, I really think it will be possible to return to life much closer to normal.

“It won’t be entirely normal initially but we will be able to come out of the lockdown and start living life again in the way that we once did.”

Boris Johnson is expected to come under increasing pressure from Tory MPs to start easing the lockdown during March towards a faster return to normality.

Scientists, though, are warning that the Government would risk a further Covid wave if it relaxes the restrictions too quickly.    

With infection levels still high in many areas including the capital, Mr Eustice appealed to people to keep following the rules to drive down cases in coming weeks.

“We need everybody to play their part, to abide by the restrictions we have got in place to limit the spread of this virus.

“And, yes, that does mean we have to intervene, sometimes in quite a draconian way and issue penalties, and we make no apology for doing that because you can see the impacts of this virus spreading.”

He added: “The lockdown will end once we have made further progress on rolling out the vaccines.

“Just shy of five million people have been vaccinated, as of yesterday.”

The Government is seeking to offer the jabs to around 15 million people by mid-February including those aged 70 and over, care home residents and staff, frontline health and social care staff, and individuals particularly vulnerable to the disease.

Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of Sage subgroup the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), said the Government would need to release coronavirus restrictions gradually.

“We need to be extremely careful with with easing out of lockdown,” he told Times Radio.

“We could look back at May, June and say, you know we very much flipped from everyone needs to stay at home to ‘let’s go and all go to the pub and eat out to help out’ - and we got this resurgence over the summer.

“I think this time we need to be extremely careful. The vaccine will help us eventually and hopefully by February, early March we will start to see signs of that but it’s going take an awfully long time before we get the levels of immunity across the population that we’re going to be able to fully release things.

“A gradual release is really what we need because if we release things too rapidly, we will start to see a resurgence, we will start to see cases climbing and we’ll unfortunately have to have more restrictions introduced.”

He suggested the Government should not over-promise, instead saying, “for instance ‘we expect these restrictions to be in place until the end of March, if we manage to get cases down rapidly then we will lift those restrictions earlier’.”

He added  there were signs the “lockdown is possibly working in terms of taking the R number below 1.

“The key thing there actually is we don’t just want to take the number below 1 we need to take it quite a bit below 1 because of course the further below 1 we go the faster those curves are going to come down and the sooner, hopefully, we’re going to ease out of restrictions,” he added.

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