Displaying items by tag: Covid restrictions

Minister for health Stephen Donnelly said that the government will continue to lift Covid-19 restrictions ‘as quickly as possible’. There would still be public health advice for situations where infection rates are higher. When asked if he thought that all restrictions on indoor capacity limits would be lifted before Christmas, he said, ‘Yes, I do. The road to freedom lies ahead, but things may still get worse before they get better. What we want to do is to provide real certainty for people. It’s been a brutal year and a half’, he added. The government is currently working on a roadmap on the lifting of all restrictions, which will be published next week.

Geporge Eustice, the environment secretary, has said it's too early to say what Covid rules will be in place by Christmas. He warned that people ‘may not be able to get together in the larger groups that they normally would’. Opposition parties have called for coronavirus rules to be the same across all four UK nations this Christmas. Sage member Sir Mark Walport has said there is little to feel reassured about. He added that there are still many vulnerable people, and ‘it's certainly not unrealistic to think there could be 25,000 people in hospital with Covid by the end of next month. We are better at treating coronavirus but the country is still relatively early in the second wave and there is a significant lag between getting the infection and potentially dying.’

After pausing for the coronavirus lockdown and summer holidays, the Yellow Vests brought their anger back to the streets for a series of protests in Paris and a number of other French cities. Their last major protest was on 14 March, on the eve of local elections. This was just three days before the country went into lockdown for Covid-19. The protests were in defiance of a ban from President Macron over mass gatherings. It is almost two years since the first Yellow Vest protest on 17 November 2018. Their numbers at first soared and then ebbed. The question now is whether they will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes as social dissension grows over Covid restrictions. People fear another outbreak of violence on the Champs-Elysées, where all gatherings have been banned.