COVID-19: UK considers easing lockdown as pressure mounts on Johnson

Following intense pressure from some lawmakers and businesses to reopen the UK’s shuttered economy, British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is said to be considering how soon to relax the COVID-19 lockdown.

The country, according to the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, has successfully vaccinated 15 million of its most vulnerable people, though the health minister is quite skeptical as death and hospital admission numbers are still on the high side.

“We’ve got to watch the data. Everybody wants to get out of this as quickly as we safely can, and both as quickly, but also as safely, are important.

“The question is a judgement of how quickly and safely… how quickly we can do that safely. That’s the judgement that we’re making this week… looking at the data… ahead of the prime minister setting out the road map, on the 22nd.”

An influential group of lawmakers in Johnson’s Conservative Party is calling for the end of lockdown as soon as the most vulnerable nine groups are vaccinated. They are seeking that lockdown rules should not be extended beyond May 1.

“We’re all filled with sorrow for the people we’ve lost, the harms that we’ve suffered but we don’t honour those we’ve loved and lost by wrecking the rest of our lives.

The United Kingdom has the world’s fifth-worst official death toll — currently 117,166 — after the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and India.

Over two months, nearly a quarter of the UK’s population has been vaccinated with a first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine,

Britain has vaccinated 15.062 million people with a first dose and 537,715 with a second dose, the fastest roll-out per capita of any large country.

The British government has been speaking to other countries across the world about giving British people certificates showing they had been vaccinated so that they could travel abroad in the future to countries that require them.

According to Hancock, “There is this international work going on because if other countries require (proof of vaccination) we want to allow Brits to be able to travel to those countries.

“We’d want to be able to facilitate that sort of vaccine certification, but it isn’t anything we’re planning to introduce here. A so-called vaccine passport was not something that would be required to access services in the UK.”