Boris Johnson has said life cannot go back to normal after restrictions are lifted on 19 July, warning: “This pandemic is not over”.
The removal of legal restrictions on social and economic life “should not be taken as an invitation for everybody to have a great jubilee of freedom from any kind of caution or restraint”, Mr Johnson said at a Downing Street press conference on Monday.
In an abrupt change in tone from ministerial comments earlier this month, the prime minister urged Britons to be “cautious” in using their new freedoms.
“We cannot simply revert to life as it was before Covid,” he said. “This pandemic is not over. This disease continues to carry risks for you and your family.”
Quoting deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam, Mr Johnson urged English people not to “tear the pants out of it” next week. And he repeated his own advice that people should not be “demob-happy” on 19 July.
Earlier on Monday health secretary Sajid Javid confirmed that mandatory social distancing and face coverings will be scrapped in England from 19 July in the final stage of the government’s roadmap out of coronavirus lockdown, with the health secretary asking MPs: “If not now, when?”
Meanwhile, The Independent understands that the test and trace service is “panicking” as it scrambles to fill thousands of vacant contact-tracing positions ahead of a summer wave feared to bring 100,000 cases a day, with private firms Serco and Sitel asked to recruit up to 7,000 new call centre staff with no clinical training and on substantially cheaper rates than those made redundant en masse in May.
It comes as scientists sound the alarm over rising hospital admissions, with Professor Peter Openshaw, who sits on the government’s advisory Nervtag committee, warning “we are all very concerned about the very rapid rise” in hospitalisations – now in their hundreds each day and, according to one Public Health England official, at risk of hitting 3,000 per day if cases rise in line with government estimates.
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