LONDON • The wearing of face coverings in England will become a personal choice and the data that will determine if lockdown restrictions can be lifted this month was looking "very positive", British Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick told Sky News yesterday.
"It will be a different period where we as private citizens make these judgments, rather than the government telling you what to do," he said.
Legal lockdown restrictions are due to be removed on July 19 under the government's road map and Prime Minister Boris Johnson will set out details about the final stage of easing in England in the coming days, Mr Jenrick said.
Asked if he would stop wearing a face mask if permitted, he said: "I will. I don't particularly want to wear a mask, I don't think a lot of people enjoy doing it; we will be moving into a phase though where these will be matters of personal choice."
Britain's determination to reopen despite reporting 27,125 new Covid-19 cases on Friday, a 52 per cent jump from just a week earlier, amounts to a bold experiment - one that will be closely watched in the United States and across Europe: Can a country with a largely vaccinated adult population learn to live with the coronavirus?
"The world is watching the UK to see what living with Covid-19 and high vaccine uptake looks like," said Professor Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health programme at the University of Edinburgh. "The next few weeks will reveal if they've gambled correctly, or we end up having another wave of high hospitalisations."
Prof Sridhar embodies a striking shift in attitude in Britain, which has gone from one of the longest lockdowns in an advanced economy, to one of the swiftest vaccine roll-outs and now, to a reopening.
If early promising signs hold up, she added, Britain could reach a coveted goal: population immunity through inoculation, rather than infection.
Britain's experience is a mirror image of Australia's, which shut its borders to drive cases down to zero, but has lagged behind in vaccinating its population. With the Delta variant now popping up there, Australians are discovering the downside of their fortress strategy and are experiencing another lockdown of state borders.
Britain's recent rise in cases, most of which are also attributed to the variant, has yet to be followed by a commensurate rise in hospital admissions or deaths.
That could be because of more testing or a greater number of cases among younger, unvaccinated people. But some scientists say it also suggests that the widespread deployment of vaccines, particularly among the most vulnerable, has weakened the link between infection and serious illness.
Mr Johnson even holds out hope that fully vaccinated Britons will be able to travel to continental Europe on summer holidays without facing as many restrictions - something that looked unlikely just a few weeks ago.
"I'm very confident that the double jabs will be a liberator and they will enable people to travel," he said last Thursday. "There's no doubt at all that once you've got two jabs, you are in a much better position."
A major test of Britain's commitment to restoring normalcy will come a week from now when more than 60,000 soccer fans will pack Wembley Stadium in London for the European Championship final.
The World Health Organisation said crowds of soccer fans, whether in stadiums, bars or fan zones, were fuelling a Delta outbreak across Europe.
NYTIMES
