To the above very valid points I would add that the government, its advisors, and the public are being guided down the wrong path by the availability heuristic. This form of cognitive bias means people attach more weight or likelihood to events of which they can readily think of examples, such as vivid/shocking/recent/widely-covered events. The Wikipedia article gives the example that more people are killed by random parts falling of an aeroplane and hitting them than by shark attacks, but the vivid and shocking nature of shark attacks plus the tendency for them to be reported worldwide means they trigger the availability heuristic.
It is the same with COVID19. Because it’s been constantly available in all kinds of media for a year give or take, and because it has affected almost the entire country in some way or another, people overestimate the danger it poses. Stepping back and being rational for a while, it seems inevitable that the UK, and indeed the world, will need to learn to live with COVID19 and its impacts. Whilst every death due to COVID is sad, every measure to stop its spread has its side effects. Those effects, including hitting the economy and people’s physical and mental health, are not readily available or measurable, or at least not as available as the COVID19 statistics shoved in everyone’s faces daily.
I suspect if one poked about one would find that deaths with COVID19 in the under-50s are of the same order of magnitude as road deaths. Again, every death is sad – I am not minimising that. But road deaths have been normalized. Nobody suggesting banning cars would be taken seriously, and that is the same thought process we must go through with COVID19.
Finally, for the record, I am not advocating “throwing the doors open” right now. The vaccine rollout is progressing admirably well, and the current measures, or some of them, will help ensure its success by allowing more health staff to move from treating COVID19 to vaccinating against it. But the Prime Minister is absolutely right – each removal of restrictions going forward must be a one-way trip.