The sensible thing to do is to wait until most of the over 50s and highly vulnerable are vaccinated before opening up properly, as it's the 50-70 year age group who make up the majority of ICU patients (see a previous post several pages ago), and it's the pressure on ICU that is crippling the NHS. This should be achievable by late march/early April. There will still be younger patients who become extremely ill, some of whom will die but the numbers should be far, far fewer than now and more akin to a 'normal' 'flu season.
This may sound hard-hearted but the alternative is to stay locked down till every adult has been vaccinated, which would mean extending the misery into the autumn, causing further social and economic damage which would arguably be even more damaging to the country as a whole.
It should, however, be possible to re-open schools before all the 50 year olds have been vaccinated, provided the numbers have come down. However, I fear that the government will succumb to a mixture of optimism and far-right pressure and, once again, open too soon.
The other difficulty with trying to vaccinate the whole adult population before relaxing is that we'll come under increasing pressure to give up vaccines to low-income countries who are really, really suffering. I think it's morally justifiable to insist on vaccinating our vulnerable population as we've been hit harder than almost any other country (only Belgium, Slovenia and Czechia have done worse [I don't count Gibraltar and San Marino]). However, at some point it's going to get a little difficult to say to the rest of the world that we're unwilling to help - especially as we'll want to make friends with them and do trade deals.
