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Alicia Kearns MP for Rutland discusses roadmap out of Covid-19 lockdown in latest column




We now have a roadmap out of Covid-19 and the challenging restrictions on our lives – I am certain that we are united in our relief.

We should be enormously proud of the evident sense of civic duty and community mindedness that Rutlanders have exhibited throughout the pandemic in the face of enormous sacrifice. In Rutland and Leicestershire, we have seen superb adherence to restrictions, and we now know that we have the highest uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine amongst over 70s in the entire country at 99.8 per cent.

It is thanks to the extraordinary achievements of our vaccine programme and those administering it that we will reclaim our freedoms. I wish once again to express my thanks to our clinicians, volunteers, Armed Forces, Rutland County Council, scientists, the Government’s vaccine taskforce, and all those manufacturing and delivering the vaccine. With more than one in three adults now vaccinated the Government can move forward with cautious, but hopefully irreversible, loosening of restrictions.

Alicia Kearns
Alicia Kearns

It is absolutely right that our schools will re-open in a couple weeks, and that we then move to cautiously and sensibly re-open all of our economy and society. Some will want us to move faster, and if the evidence allows it I would support this, but we must at all costs protect our vaccination programme and enable it to free us from the virus.

As of last week, those over 65, the clinically vulnerable, and unpaid carers can now get their vaccinations, and as the Prime Minister announced, all adults will, we hope, have received a first vaccine dose by the end of July. We also have a new asymptomatic testing facility in Rutland for those unable to work from home.

I also want to again reassure residents regarding our Covid-19 rates. It will have escaped no one that we have the highest increase in Covid-19 rates in the country. This is largely due to the outbreak at HMP Stocken which at one point accounted for over half of all cases in Rutland. For all of 2020, Stocken managed to stay Covid-19 free which was an enormous achievement, and it’s extremely unfortunate that we have had an outbreak this and last month.

Since mid-January I have been in close and constant contact with the prison and spoken to Ministers at the Ministry of Justice at least weekly. The superb leadership of the Governor and prison staff has resulted in no known outbreaks of Covid-19 within Rutland: the outbreak has not spread in any significant way into our community. This is solely due to the hard work of prison staff to keep our community safe. The prison continues to have significant measures in place to get the outbreak under control and I know as a community we will continue to exercise caution. The governor and all the staff at Stocken continue to have my full confidence.

This is a week for cautious optimism, and I am very relieved we now have a clear timeline, the first of any country in the world. But we must press forward to freedom. We cannot go back to a never-ending cycle of going in, and out, of lockdowns. We all require certainty after a year when we had so little. This roadmap gives us a path to re-open our economy as soon as possible, rebuild our businesses and industries and allow our communities to come back together.

Thanks to our collective efforts, together we will defeat this virus and embrace a brighter future, and we should be enormously proud of how far we have come.



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