WHEN to ease lockdown, the new variant risks and NHS funding were the issues raised by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.

The Daily Express

Ross Clark said ministers, MPs and scientific advisers had all been in agreement about the need to stay in lockdown while the elderly were vaccinated.

That had now changed, he added, as the number of those vaccinated hit 10 million.

“There is growing division over how and when our third national lockdown should end,” he said. “Taking a prominent role in the debate is the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who is understandably concerned about the enormous damage it has done to the economy.”

He said some MPs believed Sage wants to keep lockdown going until there are virtually no new cases but that would be too devastating for the economy.

“Lockdowns may have saved lives, but they are also horribly expensive. They reduced the size of the UK economy last year by 8.6 per cent. And poverty, too, costs lives,” he said. “As more and more people receive the vaccines and gain a high level of immunity, it is time we started to plan to get life back to normal - and not wait in the vain hope we can eradicate Covid-19 first.”

The Guardian

Sam Bowman, director of competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics, said the biggest threat to the UK was now the Covid variants that the vaccines may not be as effective against.

“We are, in effect, part-way through a course of antibiotics, where finishing prematurely after symptoms have disappeared could allow the infection to return in a new, more resistant form,” he said. “If we reopen prematurely, allowing the virus to take hold again in the younger population, we risk going back to square one.”

He said the Chancellor had backed schemes that contributed to the spread of the virus - Eat out to Help out and allowing travellers to enter the UK without quarantine.

“If Rishi Sunak argues for a premature reopening that lets a vaccine-resistant variant emerge, he may be about to make the biggest mistake of his life.”

The Independent

Mark Steel said Boris Johnson had led the clapping for Captain Tom - who raised £30m for the NHS - because it was the £30m his party had left the NHS short of.

“Some cabinet members have proposed a statue to Captain Tom, to celebrate the man who raised money for the thing they could have funded but decided not to,” he said.

“The government could have honoured his name by funding hospitals, rather than sending out billions of pounds worth of contracts to their mates in companies such as Serco.

“But how would that have led to the claps the service so desperately needs? It’s no good nurses having adequate masks and gowns if no one’s banging a saucepan for them.”