THE United Kingdom (UK) government will make a “balanced judgment” when deciding how to relax the coronavirus lockdown, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove has said.
The government does not yet have the information to show it would be safe to lift the restrictions, he told the BBC.
It comes as another 596 people have died with the virus, taking total UK hospital deaths to 16,060.
A Sunday Times report said schools could reopen as early as May 11.
Gove dismissed that as “not true”, saying no decision had been made.
He also added that hospitality venues would be among the last to exit the lockdown, which was extended on Thursday for another three weeks.
Strict limits on daily life – such as requiring people to stay at home, shutting many businesses and preventing gatherings of more than two people – were first introduced on March 23, as the government tried to limit the spread of coronavirus.
Calls for the government to provide an exit plan to end the lockdown have intensified, and some other countries have begun to relax their measures.
Gove said the UK government was taking “a deliberately cautious and measured approach, guided by the science”.
Read Also: Star-studded concert celebrates health workers
He said: “When we have the information, when we have the data that allows us confidently to relax those restrictions we will do so, but that data, that information, is not yet in place.”
He also said while the government was investing in trying to get a vaccine as “quickly as possible” it could not be certain when it would be ready.
“I don’t think it’s the case that anybody should automatically assume that a vaccine is a dead cert to come soon.”
Prof. Sarah Gilbert, who is leading a team developing a vaccine at Oxford University, told the BBC Marr that they hoped to start clinical trials towards the end of next week but nobody could be sure it was possible “to find a workable vaccine”.
She said they would need government support to accelerate manufacturing because the UK currently does not have the facilities to make the vaccine on a large scale.
As the trials progress, she said more people would be vaccinated – including the older population – to look at the safety and immune response of the vaccine.
No fewer than 482 deaths from Covid-19 were recorded in UK, according to NHS England, bringing the total number of hospital deaths in England to 14,400.
Leave a Reply