Boris Johnson says coming out of lockdown will be ‘cautious but irreversible’

"We’ve got to be very prudent and what we wanted to see is progress that is cautious but irreversible."

Any move to bring the UK out of lockdown will be "cautious but irreversible", Boris Johnson has said. The Prime Minister today attended a Covid-19 vaccination centre in Orpington, which borders London and Kent. He has earmarked March 8th as the date by when most school pupils should return. The government hope to reopen wider sections of society in the weeks and months following the reopening of schools. In response to reporters who attended the event in Orpington, Johnson said: "No decisions have been taken on that sort of detail yet, though clearly schools on 8 March has for a long time been a priority of the Government and of families up and down the country. "We will do everything we can to make that happen but we’ve got to keep looking at the data, we’ve got to keep looking at the rates of infections. Don’t forget they’re still very high, still 23,000 or so Covid patients in the NHS, more than in the April peak last year, still sadly too many people dying of this disease, rates of infections, although they’re coming down, are still comparatively high." Johnson's comments come a matter of days after the UK's R rate fell below 1 for the first time since last summer. R stands for the average number of people infected by an individual with coronavirus. For the first time since July 2020, the UK's overall R rate has dropped below 1 - currently sitting between 0.7 and 0.9. These figures can be interpreted as evidence lockdown seems to be working, at least in reducing the rate of Covid-19 transmission. Back in early January, there were some 50-70,000 new Covid-19 cases registered very single day. As a contrast, on February 11th, there were just 13,500 new cases of coronavirus reported. Despite encouraging signs, the Prime Minister concluded that we still need to be "prudent" in the relaxing of any restrictions. "So we’ve got to be very prudent and what we wanted to see is progress that is cautious but irreversible and I think that’s what the public and people up and down the country will want to see."