Evening Standard Comment: Ending Covid restrictions is a major step forward

Christian Adams
Evening Standard Comment10 February 2022
WEST END FINAL

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Nearly two years after Boris Johnson went on television and told the nation to stay at home, the era of domestic Covid restrictions in England may soon be coming to an end.

Yesterday in Parliament, the PM announced plans to remove all remaining pandemic regulations, including the legal duty to self-isolate, a month early.

Coming at the start of another challenging PMQs, in the face of the dual drip-drip of no confidence letters and images of alleged lockdown-busting Christmas parties, it was a decision not wholly removed from political expediency.

But it is a measure of the success of the vaccine rollout — and the relatively less severe if more transmissible Omicron variant — that we can set about this course, so long as the encouraging data persists and hospital admissions fall.

The move would make England among the first nations in the world to fully shed its domestic legal Covid restrictions. It would be a welcome boost for the London economy and our ability to attract foreign tourists, who from tomorrow will no longer require a test before travelling — if they are fully vaccinated.

It is not a decision entirely without risk. Levels of infection remain high and too many Londoners are still unvaccinated. Precautions, therefore, are sensible.

Much as how those with the flu would avoid commuting to the office or visiting elderly relatives, people with Covid should behave similarly.

We must also be mindful that this continues to be a difficult time for the immunocompromised, whose conditions make it more difficult to fight infection and produce antibodies even in normal times.

But this is a big moment in the history of our response to Covid and represents a major step forward in making living with the virus a reality.

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