Director of the Welcome Trust and SAGE member Sir Jeremy Farrar had some disheartening news to impart this morning on the Today Programme, eleven days before the Government is due to publish its roadmap out of the third lockdown. Sir Jeremy told listeners that there is still much further to go before restrictions can be eased…

“We’ve got to learn the lessons of history… we remember frankly easing too quickly [in 2020], and going back into lockdowns in the future. I think we should aim that this is the last lockdown of this level in the UK, but that can only be true if transmission is very very much lower than it is today. It’s still incredibly high in the UK. If transmission was at this level and we were not in lockdown, we would be going into lockdown…

… we’ve got to get [transmission] into the single thousands before we can possibly think about lifting restrictions.”

Currently there are 750,000 people in the UK who are infected. While infections are dropping quickly, single thousands is a long way off…