we've been locked down for over five
weeks now
the weeks have been cold and long but it
is now clear that in that time
this wave of covid has retreated
it's not just the office for national
statistics reporting a fall
the numbers testing positive are very
much down
indeed the fall from the peak at the
turn of the year is even more pronounced
it's possible one reason for this might
be that there are fewer infectious
people coming forward for testing
but we're also seeing the situation
improve in hospitals
so hospitalizations are now also
going down and they're going down across
the country
as our admission rates um into intensive
care and that's also probably speaking
going down in all regions
but it's really worth noting that still
the hospital admission rate
so that's the number of people um
so the rate of people going to hospital
so the forced population going to
hospital any given week is still
higher than it was at the peak in
november
the other metric is deaths which lag
behind
in the first wave they exceeded 1 000 in
a single day
once they fell to a low of seven a day
in august
but hit over 1300 a day in mid-january
there have been 21 days with over a
thousand deaths
in the most recent wave but they are
falling now
i think deaths have now peaked um but
they're still
very high they are coming down um and
the it's not just deaths that are high
but what we call excess
mortality the number of people dying
compared to what would be expected at
this time of the year
in combat in the average over the past
five years
and that's still um still really very
high as well so
um again it's getting better things are
on the right side but there's still a
way to go to any kind of
to seeing any kind of normality well
there have been drops
cases are still higher in some groups
with the embers still burnt last year
this graph shows covered infraction
rates according to wealth
the pink line shows infections among the
wealthiest 20
of the population the green line is for
the most deprived 20
of the population we see that it is in
lockdown that a real gulf
opens up between the groups thoughts are
now turning to opening up
some fear that despite millions of
people vaccinated
if we open up too quickly we risk
another lockdown scientists are asking
how many cases are acceptable and what
does the case mean if people have been
vaccinated
so potentially less likely to get sick
this is what the chief medical officer
said last month
the aim of this is to de-risk it as much
as possible by the
uh vaccine to the point where actually
we get to the stage
where the risk is incredibly low
relative to where we are now
i mean we just say just as we do with
flu where every year
roughly on an average year about 7 000
people a year die in
a bad year up to 20 000 people a year
die we accept there is a level of risk
that society
will tolerate and we have we should
tolerate
people die that's one of the things that
happens but if something like that is
our aim
when can we start coming out of lockdown
i would
say it's far too early to be able to
start making any kind of
confident judgments around that and it's
going to depend on a lot of things about
who gets vaccinated how quickly
and the impact and the benefit of that
vaccine on both transmission z severity
and on any new variants that
potentially start emerging with news
that the economy is slumped
and the numbers of people vaccinated
rapidly going up
the question is where do we need to be
to open up
deb cohen let's talk about that now
joining me is richard horton editor of
the lancet medical journal
and the conservative mp damian green
former first secretary of state good
evening to both of you
richard horton first of all as a society
do you think that we have grasped the
impact that covert
will have on us and
for how long i'm afraid not at all i
think we've taken far too short term of
perspective
we are in a very good position in the
near term
right now we've seen over two-thirds of
cases cut since january the fourth
uh we're on target to get to very low
numbers of cases by the end of february
early march
that does mean that if we can keep those
low number of cases stable we could see
some easing of the lockdown by
mid-march for example opening primary
schools but that's not the
real objective the real objective is
going to be to get the rest of the
population vaccinated
and go into winter later this year as
protected as we can be but we will see a
spike in number of cases
going into winter and we have to have a
multi-year perspective to this it's
going to take
two to three to four years to build up
the levels of population immunity
to really protect so so you say the
words
as protected as we can be is that as
protected we can be
or as protected as we are prepared to be
right so we have broadly two choices we
try and suppress transmission as much as
possible this has been called zero covid
or we say that that's going to be an
impossible dream
a mirage as jonathan sumption has called
it
and instead we're going to have to
accept a certain level of deaths as you
heard chris whittie say
in fact the number of deaths from
influenza has been as high as 30 000
in any one year in england is that the
number that we're going to have to
accept and that's going to be a
conversation politicians are going to
have to have with the country
yes well let's have a bit of that
conversation with one politician now
damien greene
do you think i mean chris whittie did
say it there but do you think that is a
message that the government ought to be
telling the people even though it's hard
to hear
that this is about two to three years
it's about an acceptable level of deaths
and it's possibly about continuing
restrictions in one form or another
well i i would take those um separately
i think um i agree with richard horton
that the idea
zero covid um is probably
a mirage that it is going to be with us
we are going to have to live with it
but in practice looking at the the whole
of society
uh if you can vaccinate uh large parts
of the other population particularly
the most vulnerable nine groups which we
have girls you know that be suffered
from
99 of the deaths and also the one thing
that hasn't been discussed yet which
uh i i know matt hancock is talking
about in tomorrow's newspapers
is the fact that treatments are coming
along so
that that fewer people will die than
have sadly died in the past
um the combination of the vaccination
program uh
and the treatments uh might mean and
should mean
that we can slowly gradually cautiously
open up with the confidence that we're
not going to have to lock down again
even though we we know now that winters
are more difficult than summers
so you see slowly gradually cautiously
damien green but don't you think we just
have to be
honest and say look you know you might
get into a pub
you might get to the outside of a pub by
the beginning of april you might get
into
a shop in me i mean do people have the
expectation
that wham bam is going to come to like
the 5th of march kids are going to be
back in school and everything's going to
open up again and
when does the government say that it's
simply not going to happen
well i mean i think i mean the answer is
the government will will say the prime
minister
uh will say broadly speaking what his
plan is
on february the 22nd we know that um and
and it does seem to me very likely that
the
the sequence will be that will open up
the schools in march
um it would i i think be sensible to
give it a few weeks to see what effect
that has on incidents
and then say maybe retail outdoor sport
some of the things that some of us have
been arguing are relatively safe you
could do that fairly quickly
and then maybe a month after that see
what effect that has
move on to hospitality to pubs and
restaurants and so on
so i think the other key principle that
we must operate
under is that we should unlock
uh sensibly so that we never have to go
back into this type of lockdown i think
you'd have another lockdown like this
would would be disastrous
richard horton sorry to interrupt
richard horton the vaccine
the vaccine isn't the magic bullet is it
because it
has to be a global vaccine or else one
of the restrictions we're going to face
presumably is
not being traveling as freely as we once
did that's right the unit of success
here
is not the united kingdom it is the
whole of the world
and this is a virus that has spread
across the whole of the
planet so it's in our interest to make
sure that
vaccines are made available not just to
our european neighbors but to
other countries around the world and
we're a long long long way
from that at the moment so it's great
that we've got i think today the number
was over 14 million
who've had their first dose but it's an
illusion to think that
our success is going to be sufficient to
protect us because even if we do have
high levels of population immunity
our borders will not be secure and we
can't keep locking people up in hotels
for the next five years so in that case
damien greene then there has to be
a very direct conversation with the
public which also affects the economy
which is that travel will not be freely
available throughout the world until we
have a vaccine throughout the world
well how available it is in the rest of
the world
how much we can travel to other
countries is up to the other countries
as much as anything
and i do think i mean we know that we
have been
with this brilliantly successful
vaccination program uh that we have
ordered
more than you could possibly need uh for
the british public well we'll be giving
it
elsewhere then presumably we'll be
giving it to other countries if we've
got excess access
eventually yes and and astrazeneca have
said that you know they're going to
sell it use it around the world and and
not make any profit out of it
which seems to me wholly laudable so yes
we will help
uh other countries whether our immediate
neighbors or indeed
um you know i'd be quite happy to see uh
britain's effort around the world
uh in some of the problems but i don't
we also have to say that sooner rather
than later
people who cannot afford to stay at home
people who have to go out to work
people have to go out to work because
their jobs will be are so insecure that
they will lose them
people are going to have to do that and
also the government is very keen to say
and says furlough is not forever. so
yeah
it is so the question is how do you
marry
people's desperate need to go out to
work when they're financially insecure
with the levels of lockdown release that
you're suggesting
because what i'm suggesting uh is a
a i mean it's gradual in that in the
terms i'm not saying that
you know as soon as you've got the first
four groups vaccinated
you open up the whole economy there are
some people arguing that i don't agree
with that
but i think within a few months you can
open up
large parts of the economy and that
would be
if you if you look at wider society
obviously covid is dominating everything
but we do have to look um at mental
health
as well as economic health and and that
does argue for
um a gradual uh return to
something like normal life and certainly
normal economic
activity normal economic activity only
presumably
if you make sure that furlough still
exists for people who cannot get back to
work
well if you were the more normal you can
make economic activity the more people
can get back to work
um and so yeah that's good all right
it's better for people to do jobs than
than sitting at home furloughed and
obviously
given the amount of a huge amount of
support that uh the government has given
to the economy
you know we can't carry on borrowing
like that we will have to have normal
economic activity back thank you both
very much indeed