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Good morning. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has been giving interviews this morning, and it was a mixture of good news and bad news.
First, the good news, which was probably more salient. Echoing what other ministers have been saying in recent days, Hancock said England was still on track to lift all remaining restrictions on 19 July. But he also made an important point about the progress of the virus.
Well, we are seeing that growth in case rates is slowing.
Thankfully, the number of hospitalisations whilst rising is not rising very quickly.
I hope we don’t have to do that, and I hope that we can take the steps on the 19 July that are pencilled in for then because the data is looking encouraging. But then for the winter, I hope that with a booster shot we get that protection against Covid very, very high.
We didn’t see any other communicable diseases last winter in any serious size at all, and so the clinical concern is that our immunity will be lower … Almost nobody has had flu now for 18 months in this country. Obviously that’s a good thing. But it does mean that the flu vaccination programme this autumn will be even more important … We do expect this winter to be challenging.
I will make a statement to @ScotParl today (c 2.20pm) setting out the vaccine milestones we hope to reach over the summer and, based on those, the path we hope to take out of Covid restrictions and back to greater normality in our day to day lives. Please tune in if you can.
