Downing Street today refused calls for England‘s second lockdown to be cut short and insisted it will run until December 2, despite four more sets of real-world data that show the second wave was already shrinking before the Government pushed the panic button on a drastic month-long shutdown.

Promising figures published today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) – which runs a massive government surveillance scheme that randomly swabs tens of thousands of people to track the size of the outbreak – suggest that the country‘s coronavirus outbreak has shrunk.