Living with Covid plan starts on Thursday, Boris Johnson ann Boris Johnson has announced the end of all coronavirus restrictions including the requirement for people to self-isolate.
The prime minister also announced an end to free coronavirus tests for all and said that from this Thursday vaccines and treatments will be the “first line of defence”. There will be an emphasis on people taking personal responsibility rather than legally imposed restrictions, he said. Johnson also suggested that the government would in future treat coronavirus like flu.
From Thursday all legal Covid restrictions will end, including the requirement to self-isolate after a positive test. People will still be asked to stay at home for five days and test themselves, but guidance for when free tests end has yet to be written.
Those who are close contacts will no longer be asked to take daily tests for seven days. The government will also scrap £500 payments for those forced to go into self-isolation from April. Statutory sick pay will once again only be paid from the fourth day of illness, rather than immediately as during the pandemic.
From the start of April, only the elderly and vulnerable will continue to be given Covid tests for free. Others will have to buy tests, though the government is working to ensure they are significantly cheaper than travel tests. Officials estimate that each test should cost a few pounds, suggesting a box of seven would be about £20.
Addressing the Commons, the prime minister said that “while the pandemic is not over, we have now passed the peak of the Omicron wave”. The current level of immunity, Johnson said, would mean that in England the government could “complete the transition from protecting people with government interventions, to relying on vaccines and treatments as our first line of defence”.
Until April, Johnson said, the government will still advice those who test positive to stay at home, “but after that we will encourage people with Covid-19 symptoms to exercise personal responsibility, just as we encourage people who may have flu to be considerate to others”.
Johnson said that because Omicron is less severe, “testing on the colossal scale we’ve been doing is much less important and much less valuable in preventing serious illness”. He pointed out that Test and Trace had a budget bigger than the Home Office last year and “we must now scale this back”.
To cheers from the Conservative benches, the prime minister added: “It is time that we got our confidence back. We don’t need laws to compel people to be considerate to others, we can rely on that sense of responsibility towards one another. Providing practical advice in the knowledge that people will follow it to avoid infecting loved ones and others. So let us learn to live with this virus and continue protecting ourselves and others without restricting our freedoms.”
He criticised those who have suggested that restrictions should remain in place. “Covid will not suddenly disappear. So those who would wait for a total end to this before lifting the remaining regulations would be restricting the liberty of the British people for a long time to come.”
But surveillance testing including the Office for National Statistics infection survey, genomic sequencing and asymptomatic testing in care homes and for NHS staff will continue to ensure new variants can be spotted quickly.
“We will maintain our resilience to manage and respond to these risks, including our world-leading ONS survey, which will allow us to continue tracking the virus in granular detail,” Johnson promised.
Sir Keir Starmer said that the government’s announcement represented “an approach which seems to think that living with Covid means simply ignoring it”. He hit out at “yet more chaos and disarray”, drawing attention to the public row this morning over the final sign-off for the plan.
The Labour leader added: “Free tests can’t continue for ever but if you’re 2-1 up with ten minutes to go you don’t sub off one of your best defenders.”
It followed a Cabinet row after Sajid Javid, the health secretary, demanded billions in extra funding to enable Covid surveillance to continue.
Twice weekly testing for NHS staff, genomic sequencing and the gold-standard Office for National Statistics infection survey will continue after Javid resisted Sunak’s argument they were no longer needed.
Public health experts have insisted such surveillance needs to continue to ensure ministers can respond in time to dangerous new variants and surges in infection without imposing restrictions.
The health secretary will have to fund the surveys from existing NHS budgets, causing alarm elsewhere in government that cuts could harm efforts to get on top of backlogs.