Despite his vaccine victory, lifting lockdown safely will test boris to the limit  | thearticle

The Prime Minister’s path out of lockdown will be announced today, first to Parliament and then at the all-too familiar afternoon press conference. It will be punctuated by four stages

between March and July, beginning with a return to school and outdoor activities. The economy will be gradually reanimated, with intervals for assessment at each stage. This must be the last

lockdown, he will tell the nation. If it is to be third time lucky, there must be no mistake. Despite the triumph of giving a third of all adults the jab, lifting lockdown will test Boris

Johnson as he has never been tested before. For the Prime Minister, the political priority is to remain in step with public opinion, carrying a cautious country with him while restraining

the angry critics who sit behind him on the backbenches or snipe from the media. The threat to his leadership comes less from the Opposition than from those in his party who, while less

vociferous than last year, are implacable in their demands for a much faster return to normality. While the PM is relying on the vaccination programme to blaze an irreversible trail into the

sunlit uplands of a Covid-free country, the sceptics are impatient to get business back into gear by Easter. By that time the over-60s, the vulnerable and most key workers are likely to

have had the jab. The economy contracted by nearly 10 per cent last year and, after a brief recovery, the first quarter of this year is likely to mark a return to recession. The sceptics

blame the lockdown, not the pandemic, for this new contraction and they still hanker after the fabled Roaring Twenties that seemed tantalisingly within reach last November. The leader of the

Covid Recovery Group, Mark Harper MP, wants all legal restrictions lifted by the end of April, three months before such a reopening is envisaged in the Government’s plan. So who is right?

The starting point has to be the devastation wrought by the second wave, fuelled by new variants. With Covid deaths now exceeding 120,000 even by the most cautious measure, the UK’s total

remains the highest in Europe. With one exception: Russia. There the official total is 81,000, but the true figure there is certainly much, much higher. Last December the Russian deputy

Prime Minister admitted that the real number was likely to be three times the official one. One estimate is that the Russian population shrank by half a million last year; while other

factors will have played a part, Covid is by far the biggest one. The Russian example shows what can go wrong when both government and society fail to rise to the coronavirus challenge. No

genuine democracy could tolerate death and denial on such a scale. It helps to explain why Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, has survived an assassination attempt and is

about to be incarcerated in an Arctic penal colony. The crucial issue for lifting the lockdown is the impact of vaccination on the infection, hospitalisation and fatality rates. According to

a thread from John Burn-Murdoch of the _Financial Times_, the evidence suggests that in the UK the “vaccine effect” is visible in the latter two statistics but not yet clear in the

infection rates. That is because the lockdown has been especially effective in Britain at suppressing the spread of Covid, despite the more infectious new variants, and so it is still

difficult to isolate the impact of vaccination. But in Israel, which is several weeks ahead of the pack in its vaccination programme, the effect of vaccination is much more obvious. This is

partly because the lockdown there, while still in force, is being widely ignored. The result is that in Israel those who have been vaccinated are clearly differentiated from younger,

unvaccinated age groups. Infection rates among young people are likely to rise as lockdown is lifted, especially once students return to universities — the main factor that caused the R-rate

to rise last autumn and sent the UK back into lockdown.  If we want to prevent a resurgence of this constantly mutating coronavirus, we need to do all we can to eliminate its presence in

the population — not just among the old and vulnerable. Hence the necessity of vaccinating the whole adult population and perhaps children too — anyone who could act as a vector and enable

new variants of Covid to emerge. There are hopes that eventually this coronavirus will become less virulent and lethal, perhaps more like influenza. But we cannot yet be confident that it

will follow this trajectory at all, let alone how soon it will do so. If scientists have learned to be cautious in their predictions about the course of the pandemic, politicians should be

even humbler in their assumptions. So far, Boris Johnson has indeed been careful in his choice of words and actions during this third lockdown. Despite the success of the vaccination

programme, he has resisted pressure to reopen the economy prematurely. He has been rewarded by a boost in personal popularity and is now clearly ahead of Sir Keir Starmer in the polls. But

this “vaccine bounce”, like the infinitely more significant fall in the R-rate and other Covid statistics, is precarious. The country may have forgiven the Prime Minister and his colleagues

their mistakes to date; it will not forgive a failure to learn from them. He must get today’s announcement right, in tone and substance. Though he has so far avoided hubris, Boris must still

beware of nemesis.  A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more

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