Amazing that not everyone agrees with the statement "if data allows - open up". The poll is showing that 34% of people would like restrictions to stay even if the data shows they could be removed.

I think there is a significant part of the population that just stays home anyway and COVID restrictions and lockdowns have made little difference to their lives.

Surveys are, well, what they are: defined in terms of purpose and sampling techniques.

Press surveys can reflect only the views of their readers, which creates a fundamental flaw in generalising the results to the wider population. Telegraph readers are, as you note, unrepresentative of that wider population: and among Telegraph readers those who respond to dog-whistle surveys are an even more tightly defined group.

In Athens you'd probably not give much weight to a Rizospastis reader survey purporting to represent the views of Greeks. Perhaps sensible to accord a similarly nuanced stance towards all press surveys.

I think its wrong to predict the future too much but I sincerely hope that cases go right down and the government gets under real pressure to speed up its timetable.

Maybe I am dreaming but can you imagine if cases are in the 100's and hospitalisations are almost zero and everything is still closed?

The UK will shortly have to begin giving second jabs to everyone who has received the first one, which will require hundreds of thousands of doses a day for a period of two or three months. This will unavoidably limit the number of people who can receive their first dose.

There's only approx 1.6m doses due in the period 8th March to 8th April, see my earlier calculations, so more like 50,000 a day not hundreds of thousands just yet.

yes, this is an area that's not attracting much attention, and one the vaccine tsar seems to be skirting around.

Details that need an airing include

• cocktail of vaccines or Pfizer+Pfizer etc
• a further, even more heroic extension of the time between jabs

I couldn't find your calcs, but are they predicated on slowing down vaccination to keep to a timetable ? :confused:

From what we have seen so far, increasing the delay further between jabs looks reasonable. That approach is working well so far.

The calcs were in a post a few weeks ago in this forum, and they are about right. Vaccinations only sped up in January. And the math is simple really. If anyone received a vaccine from early January onwards (when numbers began to ramp up), your next jab isn't due until early April and onwards. So up until then, we should be able to finish Priority groups 1 - 9 before we get to a point where hundreds of thousands are due for their second jab. No one is mentioning anything about slowing down vaccinations.

Thanks HB7 saves me reposting them. As long as we keep to a run rate of approx 3m vaccs a week until the end of March, we should meet the target around the end of March for groups 1-9, so I hope the number of daily vaccs improve next week as alluded to by Hankie to compensate for the lower rates the last few days.

But that seems a nonsense interpretation of intent.

The two jabs were to be spaced at an interval of up to 12 weeks: a protocol already beyond scope for the Pfizer vaccine. A reasonable expectation is that vaccination will go at full tilt, with second jabs given as and when the programme allows, but within the 84-day deadline. Supply and logistics are the limiting factors, not dates.

We may be discussing apples and oranges.
I'm hoping you are not suggesting it reasonable to extend delay between jabs further, beyond the current limit of 84 days....

Extending beyond 12 weeks would be outside the scope of the MHRA approval of the AZ vaccine - so I agree unlikely. Tbh it’s not necessary anyway.

Why not if there is data to support that? They will know in time from tests whether that is reasonable. It was questioned whether it was wise going beyond two weeks, but now we have data that shows very high efficacy from a single dose after one month.