The U.K. is set to drop legal requirements designed to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying the country will be following a “living with COVID” plan.
“We think you can shift the balance away from state mandation,” Johnson told the BBC ‘s Sophie Raworth. Johnson told Raworth that he wished to address the pandemic with a “vaccine-led approach” and move away from “banning certain courses of action.”
When asked about the possibility of new restrictions in the future, Johnson said he did not want them to return, but said, “You’ve got to be humble in the face of nature.”
As the BBC noted, the U.K.’s COVID-19 laws were originally scheduled to end on March 24, but Johnson suggested last week that they could be coming to an end earlier than expected. This decision has attracted the ire of the opposition Labour Party and some scientists who are concerned about lifting restrictions while infection rates are still high.
Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association, told the BBC that there was no reason to relax restrictions, saying infection rates needed to fall further and that lawmakers needed to provide data to support their decisions.
“You have at the moment more people dying, more people in the hospital, than you had before Plan B [restrictions] was introduced,” Nagpaul said. “It does appear as if the government is trying to pretend that Covid doesn’t exist in the day-to-day lives of so many people.”
Johnson is expected to detail his plan to lift the restrictions during remarks before Parliament on Monday.