Health secretary defends Plan B amid low cases and hospitalisations
Health secretary Sajid Javid has defended the government’s ramping up of Covid restrictions amid the rise of the Omicron variant, arguing that “we’ve got to act early”.
His comments come as more than 70 Conservative MPs are expected to vote against the government’s new restrictions tomorrow, in what is set to be the largest rebellion since Boris Johnson entered Downing Street.
When quizzed over recent reports that the Omicron variant is mild, Javid told Sky News’ Breakfast programme: “Omicron has only taken hold in the UK in the last three weeks. It’s already growing at a rate of doubling two to three times two every two to three days. It’s doubling and at that rate you will have a million infections by the end of the month.”
“With Delta, let’s assume that of all the infections around 2% of those people end up in hospital. Omicron, let’s assume it’s half the severity,” he said, going on: “That’s just half it. If it’s 1% of a much larger number, you still end up in a lot of hospitalisations.”
“If the government just sort of stuck its head in the sand and said, ‘Let’s just wait and see what happens. Let’s wait for the deaths to happen’, by then it would be too late… and then you’d have me here rightly saying ‘Why didn’t you act earlier?”
He also defended the government’s official advice from today to work from home where, saying: “this has a big impact on people’s lives. It’s not just a distraction, it can be really difficult for people to be away from the office, not to have that social interaction, it can impact their life chances, so we wouldn’t take this action lightly at all,” but that the move was, “based on the advice” the government was getting.
He also said that the two weeks of “observed data” on Omicron demonstrated a “phenomenal growth in infections.. around 14% of infections in London. And so because of this growth rate, and what we now know on the vaccines, that’s why we’ve announced this national mission on the booster programme.”
