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‘Signs are good’ for more lockdown easing despite Indian variant

Joe Murphy

GOVERNMENT sources today said there are “positive signs” that the outbreak of the Indian variant of Covid-19 will not derail the exit from lockdown.

Officials told the Standard there was cautious optimism that vaccines will prevent infections leading to serious illness and death, allowing the economy to reopen on schedule.

The message came through as scientists on the Sage official advisory committee were meeting to assess the seriousness of the situation.

This morning, experts said the data so far does not show infection leading to rising hospital admissions. Professor Steven Riley, from Imperial College London, said the timing of the roadmap from lockdown would be “a Government decision” but the signs were good.

“Even if infection starts to go up, we then need to assess whether that’s bringing a lot of new cases into hospitals, and there’s certainly no sign of that at the moment,” he told Times Radio.

On Wednesday, the European Medicines Agency said it was “confident” that vaccines currently in use will prevent the Indian variant causing serious harm. Professor James Naismith, from the University of Oxford, however, said not enough was known to say for sure whether the variant could frustrate the UK’s vaccination programme.

“The vaccines don’t 100 per cent prevent infection for people,” he told BBC Radio 4. “What they do is, they almost 100 per cent prevent hospitalisation and serious illness.”

A Government official said: “We are concerned and we are watching it very carefully. There is work ongoing on its transmissibility and the effects of

The vaccines don’t 100 per cent prevent infection ... they almost 100 per cent prevent serious illness Professor James Naismith

the vaccine. So far the signs are positive but it does mean we must keep up the pace of the vaccine roll-out.”

Professor Adam Finn, from the University of Bristol and a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, told BBC Breakfast there was no firm plan for vaccinating teenagers or younger children. But he added that Israel had shown that full vaccination of adults could lead to “a disappearance... of Covid throughout the whole population, even without immunising children”.

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2021-05-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-13T07:00:00.0000000Z

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