Chris Whitty tells LBC it's 'very likely things will be a lot better in the spring'
15 January 2021, 18:19
Ben Kentish questions the PM, Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance on the UK's handling of Covid
After a question from LBC the Government's Chief Medical Adviser has said it is "very likely" things would improve by Spring.
LBC's Westminster Correspondent Ben Kentish questioned Boris Johnson and his senior scientific and medical advisers on their handling of the coronavirus crisis.
At a Downing Street briefing, Ben asked Professor Chris Whitty if he thought life would return to normal by Easter.
Professor Whitty responded positively saying the situation is likely to improve by the spring but cautioned that it would not be completely back to how it was before the pandemic.
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The Chief Medical Officer said he "thought there was a reasonable chance things would be a lot better in the Spring."
The added the general principle was that it was "very likely" things would improve by Spring.
He explained that new variants make that harder but he thought over the last three weeks the country pulling together has shown "we can beat this virus."
On the vaccine, the professor said it would "increasingly take the heavy lifting and less and less of this will be requiring people to do things."
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Chris Whitty tells LBC it's 'very likely things will be a lot better in the spring'
But he warned that it will not be a case of "suddenly in Spring it's all over and that's the whole thing done."
"What no-one thinks is that suddenly in spring it is all over and that is the whole thing done. What we expect is things to be substantially better than they are at the moment," he told a No 10 press conference.
"The hope is that is a kind of reasonable timeframe to be thinking about. But if we try to put a hard stop on this we will be caught out by events.
"But I think that broad timeframe still feels to me a reasonable one, provided what we are not expecting is completely back to two springs ago."
