Medics not happy as Johnson set to announce end of Covid restrictions amid rising cases

UK PRIME MINISTER Boris Johnson will today confirm the end of lockdown on July 19 though scientists have warned that lifting restrictions is like building new “variant factories” at a very fast rate.

Some medics also described the attitude of the new health and social care secretary, Sajid Javid, as “frightening”, as he too is in favour of lifting all restrictions in a fortnight.

Johnson is all set to provide an update on rules relating to mask-wearing, social distancing, care home visits, vaccine “passports” and working from home.

He is expected to ask Britons to use their “judgement” to manage Covid-19 risks once the final stage of his roadmap out of lockdown is reached, which is expected to be on July 19.

Mask-wearing is set to become voluntary inside shops and hospitality venues and on public transport, media reports said, adding that the school "bubbles" system that has forced hundreds of thousands of pupils to self-isolate at home, if someone in their bubble tests positive, is also expected to be dropped.

Meanwhile, some medics and scientific advisors are divided about whether the UK is heading towards a third wave.

There were a further 24,248 new Covid cases and 15 deaths reported on Sunday (4). While hospital admissions from the virus are low, they reportedly have more than doubled in a week.

The British Medical Association has warned the rise is "alarming" and it made "no sense" to remove all restrictions at the same time, say media reports.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the council chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) said: “We have made excellent progress with both the vaccination campaign and individual actions from the people across the country over the last 18 months, and the government must not throw this away at this critical juncture."

SAGE member Prof Susan Michie tweeted: “Allowing community transmission to surge is like building new ‘variant factories’ at a very fast rate.”

Relying on personal responsibility is “like giving up on all traffic restrictions and saying you can travel where and how you like, irrespective of the harm it causes to others”, she added.

Reacting to Javid’s earlier comment that UK has to learn to live with Covid “just as we already do with flu,”  Prof Stephen Reicher at the University of St Andrews, a member of the SAGE committee, tweeted: “It is frightening to have a ‘health’ secretary who still thinks Covid is flu. Who is unconcerned at levels of infection.”

“Above all, it is frightening to have a ‘health’ secretary who wants to make all protections a matter of personal choice when the key message of the pandemic is “this isn’t an ‘I’ thing, it’s a ‘we’ thing,” Reicher tweeted.

Writing in a blog for the British Medical Journal last week, Michie, together with Reicher and Prof Ann Phoenix at UCL’s Institute of Education, claimed that July 19, the so-called Freedom Day, implies that "the government is planning to withdraw all forms of support and abandon us to deal with the pandemic on our own”.

More than 78 million vaccine doses have now been administered in the UK, while 63.4 per cent of adults have received two doses.