Downing Street has said the data emerging over the coming week will be “crucial” in deciding whether all legal coronavirus restrictions can end as hoped on June 21.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “There still remains that there is nothing in the data currently to suggest Step 4 can’t go ahead at the earliest date.
“But we do need to look very closely at the data over this coming week, which will be crucial to decide and really to get a sense of the data, particularly on hospitalisations and whether or not the excellent vaccine rollout programme has sufficiently severed that link between the increase in cases, which we always expected to happen, particularly after Step 3, and that subsequently leading to hospitalisations and deaths.”
Asked if there is evidence of a third wave, the spokesman said: “We can see that the cases are rising in the UK, that is both due to the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant, and to a certain extent the opening up of measures taken in Step 3."
