BORIS Johnson will TODAY summon his Cabinet to free England from Plan B restrictions.
The PM will scrap working from home and vaccine passports from January 26.
The current measures cover three areas – working from home guidance, vaccine passports for mass events, and mask-wearing in public spaces.
The most likely option the PM will take is to scrap most of the Plan B measures, but keep some mask-wearing rules in place.
Cabinet ministers are heavily pushing him to end the work from home guidance which is clobbering the economy and city centre industries.
Meanwhile, any attempt to renew vaccine passports for mass events like football games would spark another huge rebellion from Tory MPs.
As a result, the PM is expected to ditch both of those restrictions, which place the most noticeable burden on people’s everyday lives.
Alternatively, Boris could decide to go the whole hog and end the full suite of Plan B curbs including mask-wearing.
This would please Tory backbenchers who want to see Britain transition to living with the virus, but may prompt a backlash from scientists.
But Boris is expected to today also warn the threat is not yet over and Brits will be urged to wear masks in shops and on public transport.
The PM hopes the move will buy him some much-needed support among his backbenchers.
Boris Johnson said: “We’ve got to be careful about Covid. We’ve got to continue to remember that it’s a threat.”
Meanwhile, Health Secretary Sajid Javid has said Britain is winning the war on Omicron.
He added: “I have always said that these restrictions should not stay in place a day longer than absolutely necessary.
“Due to . . . the likelihood that we have already reached the peak of the case numbers of hospitalisations, I am cautiously optimistic that we will be able to substantially reduce restrictions next week.”
PLAN B GONE
A string of other senior Cabinet ministers have also strongly hinted that they expect Plan B to be axed soon on January 26.
Scientists agree that things are heading the right way.
Sage member Professor Andrew Hayward said: “It looks like the Omicron variant, by becoming more transmissible, that it’s also become less severe, and we would hope that’s the general direction of travel.”
Yesterday, the UK’s daily Covid cases dropped 21 per cent on last week.
There were 94,432 new cases in the past 24 hours, with 438 fatalities also recorded.
Deaths have risen compared to the past few days, but are still not near the levels seen in the Alpha peak last year of over 1,000.
This fits with the pattern of a Covid wave, however – a few weeks on from high cases, some extra deaths will now sadly catch up for those harder hit with the virus.
This time last week there had been 120,821 new daily cases recorded, as the country shows promising signs of the variant wave having peaked.
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