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February 22, 2021 expert reaction to roadmap out of the current lockdown for England, announced by Boris Johnson and published by the government
The Prime Minister laid out England’s roadmap out of the current lockdown in the Commons this afternoon.
Dr Julian Tang, Honorary Associate Professor/Clinical Virologist, University of Leicester, said:
“The proposed roadmap seems reasonable – will be great to be able to go to the cinema again. The most important aspect of this proposed plan is the 5-week intervals between each step to assess the impact of each relaxation step on the virus spread.
“Now that the elderly and vulnerable are mostly protected, we won’t see any of the previous dramatic increases in hospitalisation and deaths that prompted the previous two national lockdowns.
As AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine debuts in the EU market, the quest to develop and distribute Covid-19 vaccines is far from over.
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“The idea that the festivals can’t go ahead and be socially-distanced is inaccurate,” she told the committee.
“We can absolutely adapt our programming, put infrastructure in place, [and] change the way that we do things, to enable something to happen with social distancing in place,” she added, highlighting the Just So festival in Cheshire and South Derbyshire’s Timber event as examples of events that could go ahead.
Glastonbury Festival in 2019 (Picture: Getty)
Despite this positivity, Notting Hill Carnival organiser Matthew Phillip said the event could only return once no social distancing was possible.
“It would be very difficult to hold Carnival in its traditional format on the streets with social distancing in place,” he said, adding that cancelling the 2021 event would “be devastating for a second year in a row”. The 2020 carnival was the first time the event didn’t take place in over 50 years.
Dave Grohl has spoken out on the cancellation of Glastonbury, claiming that the beleaguered festival will definitely make a return when the coronavirus pandemic subsides.