LONDON (UK) – Prime Minister Boris Johnson will assess this week how fast England can come out of COVID-19 lockdown after completing vaccination of 15 million of its most vulnerable people, however, the health minister said death and hospital admission numbers continued to be too high.
Johnson is under pressure from some lawmakers and businesses to reopen the shuttered economy.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Sky News, “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 judgment that we’re making this week, looking at the data, ahead of the prime minister setting out the roadmap, on the 22nd,” he said.
Britain has vaccinated 15.062 million people with a first dose and the second dose has reached 537,715.
Hancock said the British government was in talks with other countries across the world about giving British people certificates, which is proof that they had been vaccinated so that they could travel abroad in the future to countries, which requires them.
Hancock said, “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.”
He said, adding that a so-called vaccine passport was not something that would be needed to get access to services in the UK. “We’d want to be able to facilitate that sort of vaccine certification, but it isn’t anything we’re planning to introduce here.”
The United Kingdom has the world’s fifth-worst official death toll, with currently 117,166, after the United States, Brazil, Mexico and India.
Hancock said that a new COVID-19 hotel quarantine system for arrivals from 33 “red list” countries, aimed for preventing the spread of new variants of the virus, appears to be going on smoothly a few hours after it was introduced.
Hancock told Times Radio, “As of 6.30, when I got my latest update, this is working smoothly, we’ve been working with the airports and with the border force to make sure everybody knows the process.”
