London – It sounded like a rolling disaster: England lifting almost all coronavirus restrictions just as the highly permeable delta version was Sending Infection Rates Are Skyrocketing.
but british Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Gambling could pay off well, at least in the short term, finally providing a lesson to other countries desperate for any light pandemic pandemic tunnel
“I think the UK is in a very favorable position, better than ever during the pandemic,” said François Balloux, Professor of Biosciences at University College London. “I would say that the near future, and probably the long-term future as well, looks better than it has ever been.”
Vaccines are critical to Britain’s apparent success. Britain claims One of the world’s most successful campaignsAccording to government data as of Wednesday, more than 88 percent of adults receive a single dose and 73 percent per second.
to America, that drops to 70 percent and 60 percent for a single dose for two – and Rates are much lower in southern states such as Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. Officials there are now in the same race for the vaccine-versus-variant that Britain is battling this summer.
“Many people in the US and Europe are following the situation in the UK very closely,” Balloux said.
When experts were surprised last month Johnson went ahead with “Independence Day” – so named by the tabloid press – despite the suffering of the United Kingdom World’s highest daily infection rate those days.
english restaurant allowed to open at full capacity, Bass once again rocked the nightclub dance floor, and the size of social gatherings was not limited. (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own health policies and have reopened a bit more cautiously.)
download nbc news app For the latest news on coronavirus
Masks were no longer mandatory in English public transport and in shops – although some city authorities, such as Transport for London, replaced them.
Some citizens reacted with panic, especially vulnerable people who allowed infections to rip through the country, putting them at risk because Vaccines don’t completely protect them.
Others drank it – quite literally when it came to the dance-floor crowds, which counted until midnight on 18 July, when UK restrictions were lifted. Most of the controls had already been relaxed Euro 2020, a soccer tournament Held in part at London’s Wembley Stadium.
sea of intoxicated bodies on the day of Final between England and Italy gave no clue that an epidemic was still raging. Experts believe that the tournament, with a washout at the start of summer, has two reasons that have accelerated from late May to mid-July.
Even though the government’s “immunity wall” kept most vaccinated people out of hospitals and morgues, many critics worried that allowed cases to hit 200,000 (as predicted by a former top government scientific adviser). Was) May produce new variants and leave Hundreds of thousands of people with long-term covid. Some accused Johnson’s Conservative Party of focusing more on his liberal beliefs than on science.
But the government stood firm. And in mid-July, as daily cases reached 60,000, they began to decline. More encouraging was data from Scotland, where not only did infections begin to decline weeks before England, but hospitalizations had also declined.
This third wave for the UK is nothing like its first two, causing around 130,000 deaths and briefly World’s highest daily deaths per capita. While January’s peak saw 80,000 daily cases and 1,300 daily deaths, July’s 60,000 daily cases saw no more than 78 deaths in a day.
Experts say that this is irrefutable proof of the power of vaccines.
Both Scotland and England’s declines followed their respective exits from Euro 2020. During the tournament, men were 30 percent more likely than women to test positive, According to research from Imperial College London. This, followed weeks later, in which mostly male fans packed into trains to travel to stadiums and broke into pubs to watch games.
Many experts believe that in cases of driving, there was a brief spell of good weather, in which hundreds of thousands of children were turned away from school because of infection or symptoms, or because of close contact with people who tested positive. The reason was told to isolate.
The vaccine has also been supplemented. There were two devastating waves in the UK in 2020, which means that today, either by shot or the disease, an estimated 90 percent of people have COVID-19 antibodies, According to the Office of National Statistics.
Britain is still out of the woods though
Allowing a higher number of cases to circulate can lead to more variants. The publicly funded National Health Service is not in danger of collapse, As feared during the height of the pandemic, but some hospitals are under severe pressure because of the Covid-19 admission compound backlog and stress in other areas.
In addition, many experts expect cases to rise again in the fall and winter, when children return to school and adults move indoors to escape the deteriorating weather and Britain’s long nights.
This has set the stage for the latest battlefield battle in the British pandemic: vaccination of children.
The UK says that children over the age of 12 will only be vaccinated if they are vulnerable or live with someone who is. Government advisories say the risk of side effects, including inflammation of the heart muscle, is very low. But therefore, they too are at risk of serious illness from Kovid-19.
Critics say not vaccinating children leaves a huge hole in the wall of Britain’s herd immunity.
“We should use this precious time to open schools and vaccinate adolescents,” says Dipti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University in London. tweeted on monday. “If the drop in school attendance and subsequent closures were partly responsible for this decline, they would be reversed when schools opened.”