Cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi has said he would like to see a cut in isolation times after a positive Covid test from seven to five days “as soon as possible”.
The education secretary said it was important to be “careful” about the danger of increasing infection rates, and said he would follow the advice of a review currently being conducted by the UK Health Security Agency.
But he said that five-day isolation would help “mitigate” pressures on schools, as well as healthcare and other critical services, caused by staff shortages.
The former vaccines minister acknowledged that the NHS is set for “a rocky few weeks”, but insisted that the government was doing everything possible to ensure it was able to “ride out this bump” caused by the Omicron variant.
Speaking to Sky News’ Trevor Phillips on Sunday, Mr Zahawi said he would “always defer to the scientific advice” on five-day isolation.
“Of course it would help for that to happen as soon as possible,” he said.
“It would certainly help mitigate some of the pressures on schools and our critical workforce and others.
“But I would absolutely be driven by the advice from the experts, the scientists, on whether we should move to five days from seven days. We don’t want to create the wrong outcome by higher levels of infection.”
The former vaccines minister said he hoped the UK will lead the world in moving from the Covid pandemic to an endemic situation in which the country is able to live with the virus.
But he warned that the country need to be alert to new variants of coronavirus over the coming 10 years.
“I hope we will be one of the first major economies to demonstrate to the world how you transition from pandemic to endemic and then deal with this for however long it remains – five, six, seven or 10 years,” said Mr Zahawi.
The education secretary told Sky News there were “absolutely not” any plans to end free lateral flow tests.
“I don’t recognise that at all,” he said. “This is absolutely not where we are at.”
