Reopening schools more widely from 8 March would be the “cautious” approach, and the government should stick to that plan, the prime minister has said.
Speaking at today’s Downing Street briefing, Boris Johnson explained that the date was three weeks after the most vulnerable groups should have received the vaccine, by which time immunity should have set in.
“What we don’t want to do, now that we are making progress with the vaccine rollout and we have got a timetable for the way ahead, we don’t want to be forced into reverse,” he said.
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“We think this is the prudent and cautious approach. I think it is much better to stick to that.”
His comments follow yesterday’s warning from a scientist who belongs to the government’s SAGE group of advisers that it is “nowhere near” safe to reopen schools more widely.
Professor Calum Semple said that transmission must fall “much further” - back to the end of summer level - before this could happen.
Meanwhile, at today’s briefing, England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty repeated previous comments that schools were a safe place for children to be.
Professor Whitty said it was up to ministers to decide the opening dates for schools but that he was confident the risk to children of getting Covid-19 was “incredibly low”.
“We consider school is a safe place for children to be as well as the right place for children to be,” he said.
“We were managing to hold the line with schools open before we got the new variant in England.
“With this new variant, which is more transmissible, we had to unfortunately do additional things, which included the closure of schools, to pull down incredibly high rates of increase we had up to this very high rate we’ve now currently got.
“The rates are now coming down but they are still incredibly high, if we were to start take-off again from the very high levels we are at the moment, the NHS will get back into trouble extraordinarily fast.”
