LONDON (AP) \u2014 Most coronavirus restrictions including mandatory face masks were lifted in England on Thursday after Britain\u2019s government said its vaccine booster rollout successfully reduced serious illness and COVID-19 hospitalizations.<\/p>\n
From Thursday, face coverings are no longer required by law anywhere in England, and a legal requirement for COVID passes for entry into nightclubs and other large venues have been scrapped.<\/p>\n
The government last week dropped its advice for people to work from home as well as guidance for face coverings in classrooms.<\/p>\n
The so-called \u201cPlan B\u201d measures were introduced in early December to stop the rapid spread of the omicron variant from overwhelming health services and to buy time for the population to get its booster vaccine shot.<\/p>\n
Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the government\u2019s vaccine rollout, testing, and development of antiviral treatments combine to make \u201csome of the strongest defenses in Europe,\u201d allowing a \u201ccautious return\u201d to normality.<\/p>\n
But he added that \u201cas we learn to live with COVID, we need to be clear-eyed that this virus is not going away.\u201d While infections continue to fall, health officials said that omicron remained prevalent across the country, especially among children and the elderly.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: Associate Press (AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON (AP) \u2014 Most coronavirus restrictions including mandatory face masks were lifted in England on Thursday after Britain\u2019s government said its vaccine booster rollout successfully reduced serious illness and COVID-19 hospitalizations. From Thursday, face coverings are no longer required by law anywhere in England, and a legal requirement for COVID passes for entry into nightclubs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410195,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-410188","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":410190,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410188\/revisions\/410190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}