By The Government shares ‘good news’ on end of lockdown and we are heading in the right direction.
Britain has ordered 60 million new vaccine doses from Pfizer. They will be rolled out part of a booster campaign in the autumn, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said. He went onto the purchase would “keep us safe and free”.
Mr Zahawi sounded a note of caution, saying there remained a need to be “careful” when it came to allowing fully vaccinated people to meet up with one another.
“At the moment only one in four adults have actually had the two doses,” he told Sky News.
“We are accelerating doses – April is a big second dose month – but let me show the flip side of why we have to be careful.
“If the vaccines have 85% efficacy and we vaccinate fully 85% of the adult population, that is still only 72% protection – that is quite a sizeable percentage for the virus to go after and infect, which is why we have to be careful.
“The good news is we’re not seeing any evidence that would lead us to believe we can’t meet the next step in May and, ultimately, June 21.
“It is much better to be careful and follow the data and collect the data properly, analyse and then make a decision rather than – we all want obviously to get our freedoms back as quickly as possible but let us do this properly and let’s do it safely.”
The health secretary is 42, making him just eligible for inoculation after the rollout was expanded on Tuesday – he took to Twitter, excited about having his first vaccine.
People with COVID-19 symptoms may be “tempted” to bypass the laboratory-assessed coronavirus tests and use the at-home kits instead, experts have warned.
This could potentially lead to “increases in transmission”, public health consultants said, and people with symptoms could be “falsely reassured” by the rapid turnaround tests.
When a person has symptoms of the virus – including fever, a new and continuous cough or a loss or change of sense of taste or smell – they need to get a test which is assessed in a lab – known as a PCR test.
But experts said they may be “tempted” to instead to use the lateral flow tests which people across the nation are being encouraged to use as part of the mass screening efforts.
Angela Raffle and Mike Gill, public health consultants with experience in both communicable disease control and screening programmes, warned the mass screening, also known as Operation Moonshot, was a “misguided policy, unlikely to reduce transmission”.
“The temptation for people with symptoms to opt for unsupervised, rapid, and lower sensitivity self-testing may lead to false reassurance, as happens with other screening, leading to potential increases in transmission,” they said.
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