The government review into the two-metre social distancing rule will be completed in the “coming weeks”, Downing Street has confirmed today.
The Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said the review would be led by Simon Case, permanent secretary at Number 10, and will report to the Covid Strategy Committee chaired by the PM.
“It will look at evidence around transmission of the virus in different environments, incidence rates and international comparisons,” the spokesman told a Westminster briefing.
“It will draw on advice from scientific and medical experts as well as economists and papers from Sage.
“It will take advice from a range of experts including the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser.”
Asked when it would be completed, the spokesman said: “It will be completed in the coming weeks.”
Businesses have been lobbying for a reduction in the two-metre rule to make it more practicable for them to return safely.
Other countries have social distancing which varies between a metre and a metre-and-a-half
The falling numbers of coronavirus cases has given the government “more margin for manoeuvre” in easing the two-metre social-distancing rule, Boris Johnson has said.
The Prime Minister, who has ordered a “comprehensive” review of the regulation in England, said “probably” fewer than one in 1,000 people now had the virus, meaning the chances of coming in contact with someone who was infected were increasingly remote.
Speaking during a visit to the Westfield shopping centre in east London on Sunday to highlight the re-openings, Mr Johnson said people should be able to “shop with confidence” as they returned to the high street.
“As we get the numbers down, so it becomes one in a thousand, one in 1600, maybe fewer, your chances of being, two metres, one metre or even a foot away from somebody who has the virus are obviously going down statistically, so you start to build some more margin for manoeuvre and we’ll be looking at that,” he said.
With official figures showing the economy shrank by a fifth in April, ministers are desperate to get economic activity going again amid warnings of further large scale job losses to come.
Ministers are under intense pressure from Conservative MPs who see the easing of the two-metre rule as crucial to the next phase of the reopening, including pubs and restaurants, slated for early July.
The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, said the review would look at the issue “in the round”, drawing on advice from economists as well as the government’s scientific and medical advisers.
He said it would be ministers, not the scientists, who would take the decisions on any relaxation of the two-metre requirement.
