Ministers should take a cautious approach to lifting lockdown in England so that new coronavirus cases can be driven down to a manageable level of 1,000 a day, Jeremy Hunt has said.
In an interview with the Guardian, the former health secretary and current chair of the health select committee said the government should aim at suppressing Covid sufficiently to make a South Korean-style approach of intensive contact tracing possible.
With test-confirmed Covid cases running at more than 20,000 a day, his approach would suggest some restrictions remaining in place for an extended period of time. The last time new infections were consistently below 1,000 was August.
Hunt’s intervention, made in a personal capacity, comes as debate rages in cabinet about which sectors of the economy to reopen and when. Allies of Rishi Sunak denied reports on Thursday that the chancellor has become exasperated with the government’s scientific advisers, believing them to have “moved the goalposts” on when businesses can be reopened by saying cases must fall sharply.
Hunt warned that the emergence of potentially dangerous new variants made it risky to rush ahead. “I think we have to recognise that the game has changed massively over Christmas with these new variants, and that we mustn’t make the mistake that we made last year of thinking that we’re not going to have another resurgence of the virus,” he said.
Boris Johnson and his cabinet colleagues face a series of key decisions in the weeks ahead about how to follow up the success of the vaccination programme by lifting the order to “stay at home” and reopening shops, pubs and other businesses. Schools are expected to reopen from 8 March.
An aide to Sunak said he “takes the same view as the prime minister and others across government: we should be cautious in our approach”.
But the suggestion Sunak is keen to move rapidly will not have harmed his reputation with many Conservative MPs, a large cohort of whom are pressing for restrictions to be lifted in line with the vaccination programme.
“The public health people would have the schools closed for the rest of the year,” said one frustrated former Tory minister, who said WhatsApp groups of Conservative MPs were buzzing with demands for lockdown rules to be lifted as soon as possible. “The public need to see success in vaccinations moving in lockstep with restrictions being lifted.”
By contrast, Hunt said: “I think we need to listen very carefully to the scientific advice. I never saw this as economy versus health. The Koreans and the Taiwanese have kept their economy open. All their restaurants are open, because they’ve kept case transmission low, and we just need to do what it takes to get to that point. And for me, where I’m at on that is that you just need to get it down to 1,000 new infections a day or less.”
Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, said earlier this week that new infections were “coming down but they are still incredibly high” and warned that if they were to begin increasing again “from the very high levels we are at the moment the NHS will get back into trouble extraordinarily fast”.
Свежие комментарии