“It is my strong and sincere hope that we will be able to review the outstanding restrictions and allow a more significant return to normality from November at the earliest – possibly in time for Christmas,” he said.

However, he stressed that the plan was conditional on success in keeping infection rates down, setting out new powers for local government to lockdown Covid-19 hotspots and extra health care funding.

“We’re making sure we’re ready for winter and planning for the worst. But even as we plan for the worst, I strongly believe we should also hope for the best,” he told a news conference.

03:10

Coronavirus: Decoding Covid-19

Coronavirus: Decoding Covid-19

The government has faced criticism over several different aspects of its response to the pandemic, including that it was too slow to impose a lockdown and failed to ramp up testing capacity quickly enough.

Johnson said that from August 1 he would scrap official guidance that encouraged people to work from home and give employers the power to decide whether it was safe for workers to return.

Johnson also set out a 3 billion pound (US$3.76 billion) cash boost for the state-funded health system which would be made available immediately, and permitted the use of private hospitals and temporary field hospitals would be permitted to ease the increased winter burden.

The funding announcement applies only to the English health service, with knock-on increases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to be set out later.

Johnson said fans could return to sports stadiums in October after a series of test events that will start later this month.

“From October we intend to bring back audiences in stadia and allow conferences and other business events to recommence,” he said.

The World Snooker Championship, the Glorious Goodwood horse racing festival and two county cricket friendly matches will be among pilot events, starting later this month.

The government will also increase testing capacity and flexibility, bolster its stockpiles of protective equipment and, wary of increased pressure from other seasonal illnesses, increase its annual flu vaccination programme.

An article for Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine revealed a “statistical flaw” in the way data is gathered by the public health agency in England.

Authors Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan said that in compiling death data, Public Health England simply checks its list of lab-confirmed cases against a central register of deaths to see whether they are still alive.

“A patient who has tested positive, but successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a Covid death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later,” they wrote.

They suggested this could explain variations in England’s daily toll, and why deaths there have not fallen in the same way they have in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which collect their own data.

Under this approach, “no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness”, the article said – and the ultimate death toll will include every one of the 292,000 people who has had the virus.

“It’s time to fix this statistical flaw that leads to an over-exaggeration of Covid-associated deaths,” it said, recommending only deaths within 21 days of a positive test be included in the figures.

In response, Health Secretary Matt Hancock asked Public Health England to urgently review the way it reports deaths “aimed at providing greater clarity on the number of fatalities related to Covid-19”, a spokesman said.

Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse