UK lockdown: What are the five steps to easing restrictions?

Conditions to be met must include getting enough PPE to medical staff, Boris Johnson says

Boris Johnson has set out five key tests he insists the UK must meet before he lifts the lockdown of the population that has been in place since 24 March.

Insisting the priority is to protect the public and save lives, he said the conditions were:

To protect the NHS
This means ensuring hospitals have enough critical-care capacity to cope with numbers of Covid-19 patients.

The government’s priority since the start of the outbreak has been to avoid the NHS becoming overwhelmed and unable to cope.

To see sustained falls in the death rate
The number of registered deaths in hospitals, care homes and the community has started to fall. The death toll had been tragic, Mr Johnson said, and the suffering immense. One initial scenario had seen the prediction of half a million deaths.

The death rate appeared to peak around the middle of last month, but is still in the hundreds every day, with 269 more deaths announced on Sunday.

To see sustained and considerable falls in the rate of infection
With the number of hospital admissions currently in decline, Mr Johnson said: "It would be madness now to throw away that achievement by allowing a second spike". There were millions of people terrified of the disease, but also of what the prolonged lockdown would mean for them.

A new Covid Alert System is being set up determined mainly by the reinfection rate. The alert levels will be one to five and the higher the level, the tougher social distancing measures will have to be.

To sort out the challenges in getting enough personal protective equipment to the people who need it
On the PPE shortage, he said it was a global problem “but we must fix it”.

The BBC’s Panorama reported that vital items of PPE, some of which are now in short supply, were left out of the UK’s stockpile when it was established in 2009. And the British Medical Association found that half of doctors had had to buy their own PPE or have it donated.

To ensure that any measures do not force the reproduction rate of the disease – the R – back up over one
Forcing it up over one could mean "we have the kind of exponential growth we were facing a few weeks ago”, he said.

He said the R rate would continue to be monitored and “if we as a nation begin to fulfil the conditions I have set out, then in the next few weeks and months we may be able to go further”.