BORIS Johnson has said that he will be restarting the UK Government’s daily Covid updates from next week so that he can keep the UK informed “day by day and jab by jab of how much progress we are making” with the vaccine rollout.
Chief medical adviser Chris Whitty also said that figures from the Office for National Statistics estimate that as many as one in 50 people across the UK currently have the coronavirus. He described this as a "very large number indeed".
The Prime Minister’s address at 5pm on Tuesday began with him saying he wanted to update the nation on vaccines in the context of the new national lockdowns.
Today the UK reported over 60,000 new cases of Covid, and the number of people in hospital is currently 40% higher than it was in April’s peak, Johnson said.
He also said that more than 1.1 million in England and more than 1.3 million people across the UK have already been vaccinated. That includes around 650,000 over-80s.
READ MORE: Cases, deaths and hospital admissions: The latest coronavirus data for your area
Johnson said this means that nearly 1 in 4 of those in one of the most vulnerable groups will have, in two to three weeks, a “significant” protection against the virus.
He also said that, as the average age of Covid fatalities “is in the 80s, you can see the importance of what we’ve already achieved”.
The Prime Minister said there would be one more update on Thursday January 7, and then they would be daily from Monday 11.
He said these updates would provide the “maximum possible transparency” about the vaccine rollout.
The goal of the rollout is to vaccinate the top four at-risk categories of people by mid-February. This, Johnson said, would allow the "prospect of relaxing some of these measures" before March.
These top four categories are, according to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI):
1: residents in a care home for older adults and their carers
2: all those 80 years of age and over and frontline health and social care workers
3: all those 75 years of age and over
4: all those 70 years of age and over and clinically extremely vulnerable individuals
READ MORE: 'Irresponsible' MSP attacks lockdown 'madness' in furious Facebook rant
The Prime Minister also said that there were currently 595 GP-led sites providing vaccines with a further 180 due to open later this week.
There are also, he said, 107 hospital sites providing vaccines, with 100 more due to open before the end of the week.
The chief medical adviser to the UK Government, Chris Whitty, also warned that, while the vaccine may greatly reduce the risk of Covid, it may not eliminate it. As such there may still be a need for restrictions to be in place come next winter.
Whitty presented a graphic showing how Covid spread across the UK in the two weeks leading up to December 30.
And a second showing deaths across the UK of people who had tested positive for Covid-19.
He said that deaths were now lower than in the first wave as doctors had gotten better at keeping people with the virus alive, and partly because the people who have been getting infected have been younger than in the first wave.
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