Boris Johnson has suggested things will be very different from Easter 2021.
The Prime Minister held a Downing Street press conference on Monday alongside Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government's Chief Scientific Adviser.
It is the second time he has addressed the public in a matter of days, having announced on Saturday new Tier 4 coronavirus restrictions for London and the South East and a change to the Christmas bubble arrangements.
It also came after crisis talks with ministers following France's decision to ban lorries carrying freight from the UK while countries across the world announced bans for flights from the UK.
But Mr Johnson issued some optimism as we head towards the end of the year.
Pippa Crerar asked the PM why the whole country isn't in lockdown and accused him "of over promising and under delivering."
He said: "You have to imagine a world where we kept the country in some kind of perpetual lockdown or kept kids out of school for the best part of the year, I think that would have been really disastrous.
"It was very, very important to keep moving forward as far as we possibly could."
Mr Johnson continued: "I think that was the right thing to do and now that we've got the vaccine coming in the way that we have, I think that we can certainly look forward to a very, very different world for this country from Easter onwards as I think Chris [Whitty] and Patrick [Vallance] have said before.
"It's not just very important for people's morale, but it's also totally realistic.
"We have every reason to be extremely hopeful about this country's ability to bounce back next year from Covid and I think that's the right thing to say then and now."
