As England braces for the removal of remaining coronavirus restrictions on Monday, top medics are pleading with the public not to take advantage of new freedoms to ditch social distancing and face-masks and to stick to the lockdown rules of “Hands, Face, Space”.
The plea came as a new poll for The Independent found that a majority (52 per cent) of Britons expect another lockdown before the end of the year, against just a third (33 per cent) believing the country will get to the end of 2021 without the reimposition of curbs.
More than half (54 per cent) said Boris Johnson should have delayed step 4 of his roadmap out of lockdown beyond 19 July, against just a third (33 per cent) who said he was right to go ahead. And Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth said it was “not too late” for the PM to U-turn on the removal of mandatory mask-wearing in enclosed public places.
The vice-president of Warwick Medical School, Prof Lawrence Young, told The Independent that the decision to press ahead with step 4 at a time when infection rates are running above 50,000 a day was “frightening”.
“It’s like taking your seatbelt off while you’re speeding over 100 miles an hour on the motorway,” said Prof Young. “Removing all restrictions when daily case numbers are rapidly climbing and many people still not fully vaccinated is basically bonkers.”
The announcement of a beefed-up flu vaccination campaign this winter was an indication that ministers expect a “messy situation” with respiratory diseases later in the year, he said.
Recent days have seen the government back away from the prime minister’s earlier claims about the irreversibility of so-called Freedom Day, with minister Lucy Frazer confirming on Friday that further restrictions will be imposed if infections and hospitalisations reach “unacceptable” levels.
With businesses including nightclubs opening on Monday, work-from-home guidance relaxed and social distancing and face-coverings moving from a legal requirement to a question of personal responsibility, health secretary Sajid Javid – who himself tested positive on Saturday – has warned infections could swiftly reach 100,000 a day. Chief medical officer Chris Whitty said numbers could reach “scary” levels and England could “get into trouble again surprisingly fast”.
Scotland will also relax restrictions on Monday, but face-coverings will remain mandatory.
Far from celebrating “Freedom Day” by casting off all restraint, the new poll by Savanta ComRes suggests that a majority are concerned about the potential consequences of returning to mask-free social mixing.
Some 60 per cent of 2,137 people questioned for The Independent said they were “worried” about the removal of restrictions, including 23 per cent – almost a quarter of the population – who said they were “very worried”. Highest levels of concern were found among older people, but a majority in every age-group and region of the country said they were anxious about the move.
An overwhelming 73 per cent said they would keep wearing face-coverings on public transport, 69 per cent in shops and 61 per cent in pubs and restaurants, while 45 per cent will do so outside.
The professor of intensive care at University College London, Hugh Montgomery, urged the public to maintain the protective measures in place during earlier phases of lockdown.
“The message that we ‘are back to normal’ makes no sense,” said Prof Montgomery.
“There is no ‘going back to 2019’. And now is not the time for allowing mass mixing in confined spaces, nor the absence of masks.
“The problem with shifting responsibility to the individual is that it isn’t only the people who ‘abandon all rules’ who may suffer – it is the others to whom the disease spreads. We also create an incubator for new variants. Long Covid is not something I’d wish to have, or that I’d wish on anyone else.
“So the message has to be, whatever the law, please stay in the open as much as one can when meeting, use masks when close to people, avoid confined spaces with many people in them and so forth. In other words, ‘Hands, Face, Space’ has to remain.”
The Hands Space Face campaign launched in August last year guides people to wash their hands frequently, wear face coverings in public places and maintain distance from people outside their household.
Prof Montgomery warned that huge numbers of people remain vulnerable to Covid-19, with a tenth of the adult population still to receive their first dose of vaccine and one-third waiting for the second, while there has been no routine vaccination for under-18s.
A proportion of double-jabbed adults will not receive adequate protection from the vaccine, and there are concerns that the immunity conferred on the UK’s oldest people by the first jabs in December may be starting to wane, he said.
Lifting restrictions at a time of rapidly rising infections “can only make things worse”, warned Prof Montgomery.
“The vaccine doesn’t stop one getting Covid,” he said. “Cases are on the very steep rise, and there has been a misunderstanding about the relationship between cases and hospitalisations. Hospitalisation lags five-plus days behind cases and deaths three-plus weeks in general.
“Currently, it seems that fully 2 per cent of cases are admitted to hospital. We had a quarter of a million cases in the last week. We are already now seeing 50,000 cases per day – the equivalent of 1.5m per month.
“The NHS is trying to cope with the backlog of other diseases. It is seeing a huge surge in ‘winter viruses’. And now Covid. The last two also make staff sick – so fewer staff to care for greater numbers of patients. So lifting restrictions when this is already happening can only make things worse.”
Prof Young said that as well as concerns about deaths and hospitalisations from the Delta variant and the threat of long Covid, the removal of restrictions heightened fears of the UK’s highly-infected population becoming a breeding ground for potentially dangerous new mutant strains.
And he said that 19 July would not be a Freedom Day for 3.8m clinically extremely vulnerable people, who may be forced to return to shielding as others drop protective measures.
“The worry is this is just going to allow the virus to spread and generate new variants that can be even more infectious than the Delta variant and also be able to escape vaccine protection,” he said. “That’s the biggest worry as people switch off their apps and think we’re back to normal. We’re not.
“I do feel that we need to continue with some restrictions and be cautious for a little bit longer. I hate to say it, but if all those horrible things come together, then it’s possible that we’ll end up having to go into some form of lockdown again.
Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: “At a time when Covid infections are surging, Boris Johnson’s decision to remove all restrictions without mitigations like mask-wearing, working from home, isolation support and ventilation in place is reckless.
“There is still time for Boris Johnson to U-turn on this ‘throwing all caution to the wind’ escapade by following the scientific advice to maintain precautions such as mask-wearing.”
A government source said:“The vaccine programme and diligence of the public have got us to this point. But as the data on case numbers and hospitalisations show, the pandemic is not over.
“We need people to continue being vigilant, to ensure they’re thinking about others and doing things like wearing a face covering in confined spaces. That way we can can continue to protect the NHS and each other, and make the pathway out of this much easier.”
