Coronavirus news – live: NHS ‘unlikely to be overwhelmed’ late summer as travel advice amended

Professor Stephen Reicher said people will need to be careful in future, but not in a way that limits daily life.

The government scientific adviser said: “Even after restrictions go, it makes sense to have sensible and cautious precautions; not in a way that limit our everyday lives, not in a way that stops us seeing people or hugging people, but just realising, for instance, that on the whole, we are safer outside, don’t sit too close to people, open the windows.”

He added: “So we need to be sensible about this, we need to be cautious about this, and in that way I think we’re much more likely to get to a space where our lives are much more back to normal, much more tolerable, where we can meet and hug our loved ones, but don’t just hug anybody.”

Here is Portugal’s tourism minister explaining the EU’s plans to restart tourism.

“The rules will be pretty much the same all over Europe,” she said.

In more travel news, a British tour operator has persuaded Iceland’s prime minister to permit UK holidaymakers to be admitted on production of an NHS vaccination card.

Simon Calder, our travel correspondent, reports:

Portugal’s secretary of state for tourism, Rita Marques, said the country is “taking the lead” at the European Council in negotiations aimed at opening up the European Union to UK holidaymakers.

She told BBC Breakfast: “We are really pushing hard to open up to third countries like the UK.

“I’m not going to tell you how important is the British market to Portugal. I just want to tell you that the British market is really important to all Europe, and in that sense we are ready to welcome you when you are ready to come.”

A government scientific adviser has said the public should take the prime minister’s announcement that social distancing could be scrapped in June with a “pinch of salt”.

It comes after Boris Johnson said there was a “good chance” that “one-metre plus” coronavirus social distancing rules could be dropped as soon as next month.

But Professor Stephen Reicher, a member of the Sage sub-committee advising on behavioural science, told BBC Breakfast: “I think we should take this with a little bit of a pinch of salt. Remember, he said it in the middle of an electioneering visit to the North of England, and clearly he wants to tell a good news story.”

He added: “He immediately qualified it by saying it depends on the data and how many infections there are and the state of things on June 21, nearly two months away.”

Prof Reicher, from the University of St Andrews, told BBC Breakfast: “Now, if a week is a long time in politics, two months is an eternity in a pandemic. Remember, two months ago in India they were declaring the pandemic was all over, now they’re having 400,000 cases a day.”

You can watch the PM’s comments about social distancing here:

Additional reporting by PA

Professor Neil Ferguson said he had not yet booked a summer holiday overseas, but added: “I think if for instance, by the summer, infection levels in France and Italy are the same sort of level as they are here, then there’s no risk associated with travelling overseas.

“The risk comes from going from a place like the UK with very low infection levels and going to a place with much higher infection levels and therefore having the risk of bringing infection back. If the two places are at comparable levels and that’s what the EU is saying, then there is no particular risks associated with the travel.”

To keep up-to-date on all travel news while waiting to find out more about summer holidays, you can sign up to Simon Calder’s weekly newsletter:

While waiting for the “green list” of nations for travel to be published, readers have been putting their questions to our travel correspondent, Simon Calder.

Here is our travel correspondent, Simon Calder, on what the changed Foreign Office advice could mean:

Professor Ferguson told Today his team still have some concerns about late summer and early autumn but “they’re diminishing.

“If we’re going to see another wave of transmission that’s where it would take place, but the data on the vaccines is getting ever more encouraging, particularly the new data which was released just over a week ago about the fact that vaccines, even if you do get infected if you’ve been vaccinated you’re less infectious,” he said.

“And so that has pushed our estimates of the scale of any potential autumn wave down.”

Additional reporting by PA