Elsewhere, US hospitalisations continue steady decline; Israel to allow unvaccinated tourists into country; France sticking to timetable for lifting restrictions.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to announce an end to England’s Covid-19 regulations on Monday, a day after the UK’s 95-year-old monarch Queen Elizabeth tested positive for the virus. The Cabinet will meet early Monday to sign off on the so-called “Living with Covid” plan ahead of a planned statement by the premier to Parliament in the afternoon, and a news conference from Johnson in the early evening. “I am not saying you can totally throw caution to the wind, but Covid remains dangerous if you are vulnerable or if you not vaccinated, but we need people to be much more confident and get back to work,” Johnson told the BBC on Sunday. “We are in a different world.” The queen’s office said on Sunday she is experiencing mild, “cold-like” symptoms but expects to continue “light duties” at Windsor Castle over the coming week. “You can’t help but notice that the juxtaposition of the monarch being diagnosed with Covid – or testing positive – literally the day before we will get the update from the PM as to how things move forward with the ending of all restrictions,” Tory MP Caroline Nokes, a long-time critic of Johnson, said on Sunday. “I’ve certainly had a postbag over the past couple of days from people who are clinically extremely vulnerable, asking exactly what that’s going to mean for them,” Nokes said. The UK has had more than 161,000 Covid deaths, the second-highest fatality count in Europe after Russia, despite one of the world’s most successful vaccine programmes. Mired by a domestic scandal about parties in his Downing Street office and residence during coronavirus lockdowns, alongside a series of self-inflicted missteps, Johnson is keen to present some good news to a public weary of restrictions. Despite Johnson seeking to shift political attention away from allegations of lockdown rule-breaking by him and his team, the story is still dominating the UK news. In his BBC interview in Sunday, among questions about Ukraine and Covid, Johnson also had to bat off multiple inquiries about whether he would resign if it turned out he has broken the law or misled Parliament, providing one measure of how his administration is still distracted by the issue. Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association Council, told the BBC on Sunday that the timing of the announcement “seems a bit odd,” adding that it’s a “political announcement almost pretending that Covid no longer exists.
