MASKS are expected to be ditched in classrooms TOMORROW and scrapped completely in schools next week, HOAR understands.
In a major win for pupils the requirement to wear face coverings during lessons will be dropped ahead of the wider scaling back of Plan B next Wednesday.
HOAR revealed last week that Nadhim Zahawi wanted to axe masks in classrooms ahead of the Plan B review.
Boris Johnson will rip up Plan B restrictions in a major statement this afternoon.
The PM is expected to announce working from home guidance and vaccine passports will be scrapped next Wednesday.
Cabinet Ministers met this morning to flesh out the final changes ahead of the PM’s update to MPs.
Covid cases are falling as experts grow increasingly confident the country is over the hump of Omicron.
Mr Johnson is also widely seen as dropping Plan B to sooth lockdown-hating rebels threatening to blow apart his premiership.
A string of other senior Cabinet ministers have also strongly hinted that they expect Plan B to be axed soon on January 26.
Scientists agree that things are heading the right way.
Sage member Professor Andrew Hayward said: “It looks like the Omicron variant, by becoming more transmissible, that it’s also become less severe, and we would hope that’s the general direction of travel.”
Yesterday, the UK’s daily Covid cases dropped 21 per cent on last week.
There were 94,432 new cases in the past 24 hours, with 438 fatalities also recorded.
Deaths have risen compared to the past few days, but are still not near the levels seen in the Alpha peak last year of over 1,000.
This fits with the pattern of a Covid wave, however – a few weeks on from high cases, some extra deaths will now sadly catch up for those harder hit with the virus.
This time last week there had been 120,821 new daily cases recorded, as the country shows promising signs of the variant wave having peaked.
