With respect, your answer to everything seems to be lockdown and repeatedly has been throughout this crisis. At every step of this roadmap there have been some who have opposed further re-openings, citing reasons of concerns about a spike or simply because they appear to quite like lockdowns (yes honestly), and they’ve proven to be wrong. With surge testing and vaccinations, we now have other ways of tackling the virus, alternative tools in our armoury. Why downplay them and undermine them and how well vaccinations in particular are working? That’s just damaging to the vaccine programme and people’s faith in wanting to come forward and get a jab.
I still think the four tests for May 17 easing have been met nationally with hospitalisations and deaths remaining low (11 deaths in each of the past two days) and cases relatively stable as a whole, while more and more people continue to get vaccinated. Clearly there have been some local spikes, with the Indian variant largely driving them, but surely targeted local action which we’re already seeing (not local lockdowns in areas which have already been hit the hardest and have been shown not to work) is the best way forward here.