COVID-19: UK government plans to 'end lockdown in March', says minister

The British government “hopes to make decisions” on gradually lifting England’s national lockdown restrictions by early spring, country’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on January 17. Elaborating further, the lawmaker stressed that authorities were flinching to relax some regulations so that the pandemic hit country could get back to normal. With over 3,367,070 cases and 88,747 fatalities, the UK has been hammered by coronavirus pandemic and could see London population see a fall in more than 30 years.

At present, the UK is witnessing its third lockdown. Earlier, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had clarified that restrictions would end somewhere in mid-February, however, did not lay out an exact date. On January 16, Raab spoke to Sky News wherein he expressed the government’s desperation to get out the catastrophic lockdown. ‘The roadmap that I’ve described means that by early spring, hopefully by March, we’ll be in a position to make those decisions,” he said.

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He also explained that easing restrictions would also require a phased or tiered effort as it did for imposing them. Currently, the British territory is divided into four tiers based on the intensity of coronavirus infection. Stressing the need to protect state owned National Health Services (NHS) and roll out vaccines, Raab said that it would be done in an safe and responsible way. ‘If we do those two things we get into a much better place by early spring,” he added.

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New Vaccination Centres 

Ten new large-scale centres, including a rugby ground, racecourse, food court and a cathedral, will open up next week across Britain to join the seven already delivering vaccines to immunise against COVID-19, the UK's National Health Service (NHS) said.  It comes as a further 324,233 vaccine doses were administered across the UK to take the total above 3.5 million, a milestone hailed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a "fantastic national effort". The state-funded health service leading the UK's "biggest" vaccination programme in history also confirmed more than 1 million people aged 80 or over have been invited to book a coronavirus jab at a Vaccination Centre.

Read: 10 New Mass Vaccination Centres To Open Up Across UK

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