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Coronavirus

17th Feb 2021

Pubs could be serving outdoor pints by April, reports suggest

Pub gardens could re-open in April for outdoor pints before a wider re-opening of the hospitality industry in July, after a rapid vaccine rollout

Reuben Pinder

We’re so close

As Boris Johnson prepares to unveil his much anticipated ‘roadmap’ out of a third national lockdown, it is expected that pubs will be allowed to serve outdoors from April.

The government hope to have kids back in school by March 8th, when it’s also expected that people will be allowed to meet up with friends and sit on park benches – what a luxury.

The hospitality industry is then expected to see a gradual return to normality, with the ‘rule of six’ applied to indoor customers after a period of outdoor-only service.

A government source told the Sun, “We will hopefully be sipping pints in the spring sunshine sooner rather than later.”

Daily cases will have to drop below 1000 before Covid restrictions begin to be lifted, but with every graph now pointing downwards thanks to a vaccine rollout, this is doesn’t seem too far away.

Specific details of Johnson’s ‘roadmap’ have not yet been finalised, and will be unveiled next Monday, February 22nd.

Mr Johnson said today: “We’ll be setting out what we can on Monday the 22nd about the way ahead.

“It will be based firmly on a cautious and prudent approach to coming out of lockdown in such a way as to be irreversible.

“I certainly think that we need to go in stages, we need to go cautiously.

“You have to remember from last year that we opened up hospitality fully (it) was one of the last things that we did because there is obviously an extra risk of transmission from hospitality.

“But we’ll be setting it all out on Monday and I know there’s there’s a lot of understandable speculation in the papers.

“I would just advise everybody just wait, you know, we’ll try and save as much as we can.”