The government will advise cautious cuddling when hugging is permitted in the next phase of lockdown easing in England, amid concerns over the possible increase in Covid variants.
With the data looking “extremely positive” and the roadmap “on course”, the health minister Nadine Dorries suggested friends and family would be allowed to hug when the next stage of easing restrictions goes ahead from 17 May, but called for cautious optimism.
Indoor dining will be allowed for groups of up to six or two households, while cinemas, galleries and the rest of the accommodation sector will reopen. Foreign leisure travel will also resume, with some “green list” destinations allowing travellers to return without self-isolating.
Though infection rates in England are at their lowest level since September and more than two-thirds of UK adults have had their first dose of a vaccine, scientists are concerned about the possible spread of variants, particularly one of three first found in India, as restrictions are relaxed and international travel resumes.
Dorries was asked on BBC Breakfast about what “cautious cuddling” means. “I don’t think you can cautiously cuddle,” she said, before adding that even with testing capacity people still needed to be cautious as lockdown eases.
“We do have variants of concern on one hand, on the other hand we have the capacity to lateral flow twice test everybody in the UK, we have the capacity to surge test in localised areas where we see those variants of concern and where we know problems may be rising,” she said.
“We have that in our armoury now which we never had before, but we still need to be cautious. We’re incredibly aware that everybody wants to get together, that people want to hug each other, that people want to entertain in their own homes.”
She said the UK was “still in the tail end of the pandemic” while “globally the world is still in the grips of this pandemic”.
Later on Sky News, Dorries said hugs and physical contact were “massively important” but urged “caution balanced with optimism”. “I think it’s what most people have missed, that intimate contact with family and friends, and entertaining, having people in your own house, meeting outdoors.”
Prof Sir John Bell, of the University of Oxford, agreed the country was in a “very strong position” to move forward with the easing of restrictions, and suggested it could even be accelerated, enabling people to “try and get back to normal”.
He told Good Morning Britain: “I think we’ll still probably go steady but perhaps a bit faster … I’m feeling pretty comfortable with where we are at the moment.”
But despite data from vaccination programmes in the UK, Israel and the US showing a “really very striking fall” in cases of the virus, hospital admissions and deaths, Bell said the UK was still vulnerable to importing variants from abroad.
He said: “Tactically, the most important thing for us to do is to make sure that other bits of the world get vaccines faster – the state of global vaccination is pretty lamentable at the moment and I think we need to really push to help that happen much more effectively.
“Because, in the end, we’re vulnerable, not because we haven’t vaccinated our population, but if more variants come onshore from overseas – which they will naturally as people start to travel – we’re potentially going to be in trouble and that’s why we have a real interest in making sure everyone else is vaccinated.
“That plus the humanitarian importance of making sure that people don’t die unnecessarily.”
