9News
The UK has just recorded more new coronavirus cases in a single day than Australia has had the entire pandemic — and yet the country is just days away from ditching the last of its lockdown measures.
On Friday, Britain reported more than 51,000 new coronavirus cases, the highest daily total since January.
Australia has had 31,632 cases since the pandemic began, 107 of those in the last 24-hour reporting period during which Sydney and Melbourne are in lockdown.
Globally, the World Health Organisation says cases and deaths are climbing after a period of decline, spurred by the more contagious Delta variant. Last week there were nearly three million new infections and more than 55,000 lives lost around the world.
Against that backdrop, millions in the UK eagerly await Monday — dubbed by some as “Freedom Day” — when the last of the nation’s long-lasting lockdown restrictions are finally eased.
But British politicians’ talk of freedom in the months leading up to Monday has been replaced with words of caution.
“This pandemic is not over,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said this week.
“We cannot simply revert instantly from Monday the 19th of July to life as it was before COVID.”
Hospital numbers could get ‘quite scary’
The British government’s top medical adviser warned on Friday that the number of people hospitalised with COVID-19 could hit “quite scary” levels within weeks.
Infections have surged in recent weeks, mainly among unvaccinated younger people, as a result of the far more contagious Delta variant and the continued easing of lockdown restrictions.
Despite the increase, the British government plans Monday to lift all remaining legal restrictions on social contact in England and to ditch social distancing guidelines as well as the legal requirement for people to wear masks in most indoor settings, including shops, trains, buses and subways.
The government is hoping that the rapid rollout of vaccines will keep a lid on the number of people becoming seriously ill — a stance that some leading international scientists at an “emergency international summit” critiqued as “reckless”.
The group, which includes advisers to the governments of Italy, New Zealand and Taiwan, said they joined forces through a “sense of urgency” to warn of the global consequences of allowing the delta variant to spread rapidly through the British population.
The scientists warned that the combination of high infection prevalence and high levels of vaccination “create the conditions in which an immune escape variant is most likely to emerge.”
One of the co-signatories to Friday’s statement, Dr. William A. Haseltine of the New York-based think tank Access Health International, went further, describing the strategy as “murderous” and “unconscionable.”
Families representing many of those who have died from COVID-19 in the UK also joined in the criticism of the Conservative government’s plan.
“The overwhelming scientific consensus is that lifting restrictions on Monday will be disastrous, and bereaved families know firsthand how tragic the consequences of unlocking too early can be,” said Jo Goodman, co-founder of COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice. “There is a real fear that once again the government’s thinking is being driven by what’s popular rather than the interests of the country.”
Other parts of the UK — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — are taking more cautious steps out of lockdown.
So far, the number of people in hospitals with virus-related illnesses and subsequently dying remains relatively low, certainly when compared with the peak of the second wave of the pandemic earlier this year.
But with the government putting the country on notice that daily case numbers could rise to over 100,000 sometime this summer, concerns are clearly growing. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has sought to rein in any euphoria around Monday’s lifting of restrictions, an occasion tagged “Freedom Day” on social media.
Johnson is urging people to remain vigilant when meeting with others and to carry on wearing masks in enclosed and crowded places.
His chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, told a webinar hosted by London’s Science Museum late Thursday that the UK is “not out of the woods yet”.
“I don’t think we should underestimate the fact that we could get into trouble again surprisingly fast,” Whitty said.
More cases will inevitably lead to more people requiring hospital attention even though the vaccine rollout has helped build a wall of immunity around those deemed to be the most vulnerable to disease. More than two-thirds of British adults have received both doses of a vaccine, and almost 88 per cent have had one dose.
Friday’s government data showed 3964 people hospitalised with COVID-19, the most since late March. Though the number has gone up steadily in recent weeks, it remains far lower than at the height of the second wave in January, when hospitals had around 40,000 COVID-19 patients admitted.
Alongside the increase in hospitalisations, daily virus-related deaths have risen to levels not seen since March. Another 49 virus-related deaths were recorded Friday, taking the UK’s total to 128,642, the seventh-highest in the world.
Government medical adviser Whitty warned that the number of people in hospitals with COVID-19 is doubling about every three weeks and could reach “quite scary numbers” if the current trend continues.
“We are not by any means out of the woods yet on this. We are in much better shape due to the vaccine program, and drugs and a variety of other things,” he said.
“But this has got a long way to run in the UK, and it’s got even further to run globally,” he added.
