Restrictions including COVID-19 passes, mask mandates, and work-from-home requirements will be removed in England, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday. Johnson also suggested that self-isolation rules may also be thrown out at the end of March as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic becomes endemic.
Effective immediately, the UK government is no longer asking people to work from home. The COVID pass mandate for nightclubs and large events won’t be renewed when it expires on Jan. 26. And from Thursday, indoor mask-wearing will no longer be compulsory anywhere in England.
The requirement for secondary school pupils to wear masks during class and in communal areas will also be removed from the Department for Education’s national guidance.
Roaring cheers from lawmakers could be heard in the House of Commons following Johnson’s announcements on masks.
People who test positive for COVID-19 and their unvaccinated contacts are still required to self-isolate, but Johnson said he “very much expect[s] not to renew” the rule when the relevant regulations expire on March 24.
“As COVID becomes endemic, we will need to replace legal requirements with advice and guidance, urging people with the virus to be careful and considerate of others,” the prime minister said.
Asked to remove testing rules for vaccinated UK-bound travellers, Johnson said the government is reviewing the testing arrangements on travel and that an announcement can be expected in the coming days.
But he refused to reconsider the vaccination mandate for frontline health care workers, insisting “the evidence is clear that health care professionals should get vaccinated.”
Johnson told MPs that the Cabinet decided to remove its so-called “Plan B” measures on Wednesday morning as data suggest the Omicron wave has peaked nationally, and he attributed stabilising hospital admission numbers to “the extraordinary booster campaign” and the public’s compliance to the restriction measures.
The removal of the “Plan B” measures against the CCP virus came as the prime minister battles increasing pressure calling for him to resign over alleged lockdown-breaching parties in Number 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence, during the pandemic.
It also came after Number 10 received a petition on Monday signed by more than 200,000 people, calling for an end to vaccine passports and similar COVID certifications.
A separate petition calling on the reversal of vaccine mandates for health care workers, which was also delivered to Number 10 on Monday, received about 160,000 signatures.
Governments in Scotland and Wales have also announced the removal of Omicron curbs, but mandatory indoor mask-wearing and COVID passes will remain in place.
Regarding masks, the prime minister said the basic policy will be to “trust the judgment of the British people and no longer criminalize anyone who chooses not to wear one.”
“From tomorrow we will no longer require face masks in classrooms, and the Department for Education will shortly remove national guidance on their use in communal areas,” Johnson told the House of Commons.
Sajid Javid told a Downing Street press conference that “we cannot eradicate this virus and its future variants.”
“Instead we must learn to live with Covid in the same way we have to live with flu,” he said.
See Prime Minister Johnson’s remarks:
The Telegraph of London reported members of the British Parliament confronted Johnson with the model upon which the lockdown was based, which warned of 4,000 deaths a day.
The most recent complete data from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – on Jan. 11 – showed a seven-day average of 232 deaths a day attributed to COVID-19.
In the U.S., with the more contagious yet much milder omicron variant now about 99% of new cases, nearly every state last week was recording a doubling of cases from week to week. But seven states, as of Wednesday morning, are recording declining cases.
Conservative MP Steve Baker, deputy chairman of the COVID recovery group, said the “reality is the Prime Minister was shown a terrifying model which was subsequently proven to be widely incorrect but he took away freedoms from tens of millions on that basis.”
“It is monstrous that millions of people were locked down, effectively under house arrest, their businesses destroyed, their children prevented from getting an education,” the Parliament member said.
“The situation is now perfectly plain that even our most basic liberties can be taken away by the stroke of a pen, if a minister has been shown sufficiently persuasive modeling that tells them there is trouble ahead.”
Baker said he told Johnson to challenge the modeling by Cambridge University and Public Health England. Prof. Tim Spector of King’s College London and Prof. Carl Heneghan of Oxford University were called into Downing Street to go over the data, the Telegraph reported.
“But by the time the models were shown to be inaccurate, it was too late to stop public calls for restrictions,” the British broadsheet said.
Official U.K. data on deaths within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths)
In a separate story, the Telegraph recalled that in the early stages of the pandemic, the British government’s coronavirus strategy was to “flatten the peak” of cases.
However, the government made an about face when Imperial College of London published its Report 9 in March 2020 projecting 500,000 deaths in the United Kingdom if politicians took no action.
The model by lead researcher Neil Ferguson also projected 2.2 million deaths in the United States, and after Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx confronted President Trump with the horrifying figures, the White House followed suit.
But the hard data and studies from around the world show the lockdowns and other severe mitigation measures didn’t stop the typical waxing and waning of a respiratory virus pandemic. And the Telegraph spoke with an expert on infectious disease modeling at Bristol University in England who made the point that even if “the government didn’t put in restrictions, people would have started behaving differently.”
“But we ended up with the baseline being ‘assuming nothing changes,’ because it’s difficult to know what the alternative baseline is,” said Dr. Ellen Brooks-Pollock.
The London paper cited a well-known aphorism among scientists, coined by the British statistician George Box in 1976.
“All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”