Lockdown easing could start in early March, vaccines minister says

Nadhim Zahawi has suggested a gradual easing of lockdown restrictions won’t begin before early March. 

Vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi told BBC Breakfast this morning: “If we take the mid-February target, two weeks after that you get your protection, pretty much, for the Pfizer/BioNTech, three weeks for the Oxford/AstraZeneca, you are protected.

“One of the things we don’t know yet, and the deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam is on record as saying ‘look give me a couple of months and I’ll tell you’, is the impact of the vaccine on transmission rates ie on infecting people.

“So there are a number of caveats that stand in the way of us reopening the economy.

“It will be gradual, it will be probably through the tiered system but you’re looking at that sort of period, two to three weeks after the middle of February, after we’ve protected the top four cohorts.”

The lockdown is set to be reviewed by the government on February 22nd with legislation possibly running until March 31st. 

Chief Executive of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens has warned that the NHS has been left in the most precarious position after the second spike in Covid.

Speaking on the vaccine, he said: “The facts are very clear and I’m not going to sugar coat them. Hospitals are under extreme pressure and staff are under extreme pressure.

“Since Christmas Day we’ve seen another 15,000 increase in the inpatients in hospitals across England. That’s the equivalent of filling 30 hospitals full of coronavirus patients and, staggeringly, every 30 seconds across England another patient is being admitted to hospital with coronavirus.”

Latest figures suggest that the third lockdown is having the desired effect, with the number of cases in the week to Sunday January 17th down 22.5% from the previous week.

However, deaths and hospital admissions remain extremely high and experts have stressed the importance of sticking to lockdown restrictions. 

Stevens added that the appearance of virus mutations is one of the factors that will determine when lockdown restrictions can be lifted. 

He said: “It’s not going to be the case that on Valentine’s Day, or on February 15th, with one bound we are free. But equally, I don’t think that we will be having to wait until the autumn. I think somewhere between those two.

“Subject of course to this uncertainty about new variants of the coronavirus. And it will be very important that we don’t see those taking off in a way that undermines the effectiveness of vaccines that we currently have.”