Boris Johnson is preparing to lift the remaining Covid-19 restrictions once and for all from Thursday.

Even though hundreds of people are dying with the virus every week, the prime minister intends to end the legal requirement for self-isolation as part of his ‘living with Covid’ plan for England.

Alongside this, he said ‘we will be testing at a much lower level’, adding ‘we don’t need to keep spending at a rate of £2 billion a month’.

In an interview with the BBC, the Tory leader admitted ‘Covid remains a dangerous disease’, but added: ‘We have reached a stage where we think you can shift the balance away from state mandation, away from banning certain courses of action, and compelling certain courses of action, in favour of encouraging personal responsibility.’

Local authorities will also be required to manage outbreaks on their own with pre-existing public health powers, as they would with other diseases.

Free lateral flow and PCR tests will also be scrapped, alongside the £500 self-isolation payment for low-income workers

Mr Johnson’s decision has been blasted as ‘declaring a victory before the war is over’.

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Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting accused the PM of trying to overshadow the ‘partygate’ scandal the Metropolitan Police is investigating with ‘Freedom Day’.

He said: ‘At this stage, the prime minister is mudding the waters. We want to see the government publish the scientific advice because at the moment, this seems very premature.

‘It seems like Boris Johnson is keen to declare a victory before the war is over in the hope he gets some headlines about victory day on Covid, instead of police officers asking questions about actions in Number 10.’

The frontbencher also compared the PM’s intention to end free Covid tests with having ’10 minutes left to play and swapping your best defender’ in an interview with the BBC.

His concerns were echoed by Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of SAGE, who insisted there is a concern over the high numbers of cases when it comes to dropping self-isolation.

‘It seems a rather odd decision to make. We need to see case rates fall down even more – remembering that people aren’t being restricted at the moment in any severe way at all – people are living normally.

‘The second thing is we do need therefore to continue having surveillance, because you won’t know whether you’ve reached that point where the infection rates have come down enough until you’ve had that surveillance.’

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