Live as Boris Johnson holds press conference amid rising concern over Indian variant
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Mr Johnson has called a Downing Street press conference after Public Health England (PHE) confirmed that four people have died from the India Covid variant, which is spreading in parts of the UK.
The start of the press conference has been delayed until 5.30pm.
Scroll down for updates.
Live as Boris Johnson holds press conference amid rising concern over Indian variant
Lockdown stage four not “impossible"
A downbeat Boris Johnson has said he does not think it is “impossible” to go ahead with step four of the road map to easing coronavirus restrictions.
The Prime Minister told the Downing Street press conference: “This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible that we will be able to go ahead with step four.
“I don’t think that’s the case at all. But it does now mean there’s the risk of disruption and delay, and delay to that ambition, and we have to be utterly realistic about that.”
Indian variant is elsewhere in UK
Chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said that Bolton is not the only place which has the new variant as it is “quite widely seeded in a number of parts of England and indeed elsewhere in parts of the four nations of the United Kingdom”.
The rates in Bolton, which had been going down, have been going up “very significantly over the last couple of weeks.”
He told a Downing Street press conference that, importantly, the rates in people aged over 60 have not been going up, which is key as it tends to correlate with the number of people going into hospital, some people become severely ill and those who die.
He added that “this may be a delay or the vaccine is helping to protect those who are older and who are vaccinated”.
Variant data “will come in time"
Prof Whitty said the UK was sticking to the tests it set itself when it first laid out the road map out of lockdown.
“(The) vaccine deployment programme remains successful, vaccines are reducing hospitalisations and deaths – there is very clear evidence they are and nothing has changed on that.
“Infection rates are not causing NHS pressure – the data on that is really clear, and with the variants of concern, excluding the (India variant), really there’s no change – most of them are relatively stable.”
Prof Whitty said that the UK’s leading scientists still believed that vaccination would protect against severe disease and hospital admissions from the variant.
“We’re not so confident about the degree to which it protects against milder disease and transmission, and that’s just because we don’t have the data but that will come with time,” he said.