Name: Covid UK: As virus cases drop, how can we safely ease restrictions? - BBC Newsnight
Uploaded: 2021-02-13T23:00:03.000Z
Duration: 12 min 26 s
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we've been locked down for over five weeks now.

The weeks have been cold and long, but it is now clear that in that time this wave of co vid has retreated.

It's not just the office for National Statistics reporting before the numbers testing positive are very much down.

Indeed, the fall from the peak at the turn of the year is even more pronounced.

It's possible one reason for this might be that there are fewer infectious people coming forward for testing.

But we're also seeing the situation improving hospitals, so hospitalizations are now also going down, and they're going down across the country as our admission rates into intensive care.

And that's also probably speaking going down in all regions.

But it's really worth noting that still the hospital admission rates So that's the number of people, um, eso the rate of people going into hospital.

So the before the population going into hospital, any given week is still higher than it was at the peak in November.

Thea the metric his deaths, which lag behind in the first wave.

Once they fell to a low of seven a day in August put it over 1300 a day in mid January.

There have been 21 days with over 1000 deaths in the most recent wave, but they are falling now.

E think deaths have now peaked, but they're still very high.

The it's not just deaths that are high, but what we call excess mortality, the number of people dying compared to what would be expected at this time of the year in competitive in the average over the past five years on, that's still still really very high as well.

Things are on the right side, but there's still a way to go to any kind of seeing any kind of normality.

While there have been drops, cases are still higher in some groups.

With the embers still burned last year, this graph shows covert infection rates.

According toa wealth, the Pink Line shows infections among the wealthiest 20% of the population.

The Green Line is for the most deprived 20% of the population.

We see that it is in lock down that a real gulf opens up between the groups, thoughts and our turning toe opening up.

Some fear that despite millions of people vaccinated, if we open up too quickly, we risk.

And of the locked out scientists are asking how many cases air acceptable on what does the case mean if people have been vaccinated, so potentially less likely to get sick?

This'd is what the chief medical officer said last month.

Risk it as much as possible by the vaccine, to the point where actually we get to the stage where the risk is incredibly low relative to where we are now.

I mean, we just say, just as we do with flu, where every year, roughly on an average year, about 7000 people a year die in a bad year, up to 20,000 people a year die.

We accept there is a level of risk that society will tolerate.

But if something like that, it's our rain.

When can we start coming out of lock down?

I would say it's far too early to be ableto start making any kind of confident judgements around that it's gonna depend on a lot of things about you get vaccinated.

How quickly on the impact on the benefit of that vaccine on both transmissions, the severity and on any new variants that potentially start emerging with news that the economy has slumped on the numbers of people vaccinated rapidly going up?

Joining me is Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet Medical Journal on the conservative MP.

Damian Green, former first secretary state.

Good evening to both of you, Richard Horton.

First of all, as a society, do you think that we have grasped the impact that Corbyn will have on us on for how long?

I think we've taken far too short term of perspective.

We are in a very good position in the near term right now.

We've seen over two thirds of cases cuts since January.

We're on target to get to very low numbers of cases by the end of February early March.

That does mean that if we can keep those low number of cases stable, We could see some easing of the lock down by mid March, for example, opening primary schools.

The real objective is going to be to get the rest of the population vaccinated and go into winter later this year.

But we will see a spike in number of cases going into winter on.

We have toe have a multiyear perspective to this.

It's going to take 2 to 3 to four years to build up the levels of population immunity to really protective.

So you say the words, as protected as we can be, is that is protected.

We can be or is protected as we're prepared to be right, So we have broadly two choices.

We try and suppress transmission as much as possible.

This has been called Zero Cove it or we say, that that's going to be an impossible dream.

Instead, we're going to have to accept a certain level off deaths, as you heard Chris Witty say.

In fact, the number of deaths from influenza has been asshole Aya's 30,000 in any one year in England.

Is that the number that we're going to have to accept?

That's gonna be a conversation politicians they're gonna have to have with the country.

Yes, well, let's have a bit of that conversation with one politician now.

But do you think that is the message of the government ought to be telling the people, even though it's hard to hear that this is about 2 to 3 years, it's about an acceptable level of deaths, and it's possibly about continuing restrictions in one form or another.

Well, I would take those separately I think I agree with, which is holding that the idea.

Zero co vid eyes probably a mirage that it is going to be with us.

We are going to have to live with it, but in practice, looking at that, the whole of society, if you can vaccinate large parts of the other population, particularly the most vulnerable nine groups, which we have got, you know, beat suffered from 99% of the deaths on also the one thing that hasn't been discussed yet, which I know about.

Hancock is talking about in tomorrow's newspapers is the fact that treatments air coming along so that that fewer people will die than have sadly died in the past.

The combination of the vaccination program on the treatments might mean and should mean that we can slowly, gradually, cautiously open up with the confidence that we're not going to have to lock down again, even though we we know now that winter's air more difficult than summers, you think slowly, gradually, cautiously, Damian Green.

But don't you think we just have to be honest and say, Look, you know, you might get into a pub, you might get to the outside of a pub.

By the beginning of April, you might get into a shop in me.

Do people have the expectation that wham bam is going to come to like the fifth of March?

Kids going back in school and everything is gonna open up again?

And when does the government say that is simply not gonna happen?

Well, I mean, I think the answer is the government will say the prime minister will say, broadly speaking, what his plan is on February the 22nd.

We know that on day and it does seem to me very likely that the sequence will be that will open up the schools in March.

Um, it would, I think, be sensible to give it a few weeks to see what effect that has on incidents and then say, Maybe retail, outdoor sport.

Some of the things that you know some of us have been arguing are relatively safe.

You could do that fairly quickly on then, maybe a month after that.

The fact that has moved on to hospitality, Thio, pubs and restaurants and so on.

So I think the key principle that we must operate under is that we should unlock sensibly so that we never have to go back into this type of lock down.

They're locked down like this would be disastrous.

The vaccine isn't the magic bullet, is it?

Because it has to be a global vaccine or else one of the restrictions were going to face, presumably is not being traveling as freely as we once did.

The unit of success here is not the United Kingdom.

It is the whole of the world on This is a virus that has spread across the whole of the planet.

So it's in our interest to make sure that vaccines are made available not just to our European neighbors, but to other countries around the world.