UK coronavirus: Johnson confirms it will take months until most of vulnerable group are vaccinated - as it happened
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6.37pm GMT
It will inevitably take some months before all the most vulnerable are protected - long, cold months.
We will judge the situation ... on the basis of the data. But I think, for the time being, you have got to take it that tiering is going to be a very, very important part of our campaign against coronavirus.
Do I think there will come a big moment where we have a massive party and throw our masks and hand sanitiser and say that's it, it's behind us', like the end of the war? No, I don't. I think those kind of habits that we have learned from... will, perhaps persist for many years, and that may be a good thing if they do.
And, maybe ... on the other hand, we may want to get back to life as pretty much as close to normal.
I don't think we are going to eradicate coronavirus ever. I think it's going to be with humankind forever. I think we may get to a point where coronavirus becomes a seasonal problem. I don't want to draw too many parallels with flu, but, possibly, that is the kind of way we would learn to live with it.
6.19pm GMT
At his press conference Boris Johnson repeatedly claimed that mass testing - or community testing, as the government now calls it - could play a major role in combating coronavirus. He said it could be the tool" that would allow areas to move from a high tier to a low tier, alongside the vaccine. (See 5.33pm.) It would allow communities to have agency as they tackled the pandemic, he said. (See 5.47pm.)
It is worth pointing out that Sage, the government's Scientific Advisory Committee for Emergencies, is more sceptical about the potential benefits of mass testing. Here is an extract from a consensus statement (pdf) from SPI-M-O (the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational - effectively a Sage sub committee) that was drafted on 18 November and released at the end of last week. It said (bold type in the original):
A one-off period of mass testing should not be thought of as reducing R, but as reducing post-testing prevalence compared to what it otherwise would have been. Once the testing period is over, if no additional control measures are put in place, the epidemic will return to its previous trajectory.
Focussed, more frequent testing of people who are at higher risk of being infected (such as key workers, health and social care workers and people in high prevalence areas) is likely to have a bigger impact than less frequent testing of the whole population. It is plausible that targeting groups who are less likely to have symptoms (and therefore be picked up from symptomatic testing), such as younger adults may have a greater effect, but we are not aware of any work evaluating such a strategy ...
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