Latest updates: concern that spread of variant found in India, B1.617.2, may derail planned easing of lockdown restrictions in England
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Zahawi, doing the rounds on the airwaves for the government this morning, has warned there could be a delay to the planned easing of restrictions on 21 June if infection rates rise significantly.
But that Monday’s easing of restrictions would still go ahead despite concerns over the variant first found in India. He told LBC:
The way we don’t have to do that is by everybody doing their bit, by taking the two tests a week, doing your PCR test in those areas, and to isolate, isolate, isolate.
We have got to break the cycle of infection, because one of those big tests was infection rates have to be suppressed, and the other big test is variants. If those cause a problem, then the tests will fail. The four tests have to be met for June 21.
And when you look at the numbers of cases that we’re seeing, it is predominantly increasing in those people who are of an age that won’t really have had much access to vaccines so far.
So it’s not all bad news because even people who get the infection seem to be getting a much milder infection if they’ve had vaccine, and we’ve heard doctors talking about this from India, saying that people after vaccine are still getting the Indian variant but much less severely.
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everyone joining our live coverage of Covid developments in the UK.
The top story this morning surrounds concern that the spread of a variant first found in India could derail the planned easing of restrictions in England, with officials considering “flexing” the country’s inoculation campaign and adopting a policy of “surge vaccinations”.
The clinicians will look at all of this to see how we can flex the vaccination programme to make it as effective as possible to deal with this surge in this variant, the B1617.2.
They will make those decisions and we will be ready to implement, whether it’s vaccinating younger cohorts. We have been doing some work on multi-generational households where we vaccinate the whole household, over-18s, and of course the older groups who are already eligible.
The downside of that is who do you take the vaccines from? And one of the difficulties with vaccination is that it does take a couple of weeks to work, so if you’re moving vaccines away from areas where they currently don’t have much Indian variant and that is increasing, by the time you start getting round to vaccinating that group again when maybe the epidemic, the Indian variant, is increasing rapidly again, probably you might well have been able to stop that if you hadn’t diverted vaccine to surge areas. So it’s not an easy question either way, to be honest.
#COVID19 #JCVI #Indian #Variant 2/2
If the government stops areas with high #IndianVariant cases form ‘surge vaccinating’ target areas (which will contribute to reduced transmission) – it will reduce our local capacity to control spread.
“I hold this truth to be self evident..” https://t.co/jXctbb3d2x
#COVID19 #JCVI @DHSC #Indian #variant 1/2
At the moment the Indian variant is surging in a small number of #localgov areas. These areas have a window of opportunity to control the wider spread across the UK by a mixture of community engagement, surge testing and surge vaccination
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