Coronavirus: Lifting lockdown requires balanced judgement - Gove - BBC News

The government will make a "balanced judgement" when deciding how to relax the coronavirus lockdown, Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove has said.

The government does not yet have the information to show it would be safe to lift the restrictions, he told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show.

It comes after a Sunday Times report said schools could reopen as early as 11 May as part of an exit plan.

Mr Gove dismissed that as "not true", saying no decision had been made.

He also added that hospitality venues would be among the last to have restrictions lifted.

The UK's lockdown was extended on Thursday for another three weeks.

Strict limits on daily life - such as requiring people to stay at home, shutting many businesses and preventing gatherings of more than two people - were first introduced on 23 March, as the government tried to limit the spread of coronavirus.

The latest figures for the UK show 15,464 people have died in hospitals.

Calls for the government to provide an exit plan to end the lockdown have intensified, and some other countries have begun to relax their measures.

Mr Gove said the UK government was taking "a deliberately cautious and measured approach guided by the science".

He said: "When we have the information, when we have the data that allows us confidently to relax those restrictions we will do so, but that data, that information, is not yet in place."

He also said that while the government was investing in trying to get a vaccine as "quickly as possible" it could not be certain when it would be ready.

"I don't think it's the case that anybody should automatically assume that a vaccine is a dead cert to come soon."

Prof Sarah Gilbert, who is leading a team developing a vaccine at Oxford University, told the BBC's Andrew Marr that they hoped to start clinical trials towards the end of next week but nobody could be sure it was possible "to find a workable vaccine".

She said they would need government support to accelerate manufacturing because the UK currently does not have the facilities to make the vaccine on a large scale.

As the trials progress, she said more people would be vaccinated - including the older population - to look at the safety and immune response of the vaccine.

"That's important because it's the older population that we really need to protect with the vaccine. But with vaccines in general, you get not-so-good immune responses as the immune system ages."

She added that other coronaviruses have shown scientists that immunity is not usually very long-lived, but there was a difference between immunity acquired after natural infection and immunity acquired after vaccination.

"We could find the vaccine-induced immunity lasts a lot longer than infection-induced immunity," she said.

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2020-04-19 09:49:06Z
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