BBC News
But with infection rates and hospital admissions already rising sharply, it is a significant gamble.
One expert likens what is being done to taking the control rods out of a nuclear reactor . This is going to make things worse than they are now and we don t know when it will peak, says Loughborough University data analyst Dr Duncan Robertson.
And that in many ways goes to the heart of the issue.
This is our first natural wave of Covid - all the others have been brought to an end through lockdown and restrictions. The plan is for this one to exhaust itself. So predicting what will happen is much more difficult. After all, no other country in the world has attempted to do what England is doing, in the face of rapidly rising infection rates, driven by a more transmissible variant.
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