Daily virus cases may rise to 100,000: UK
LONDON: The UK announced plans to further relax to its pandemic curbs on Tuesday despite warning that the number of daily new cases is set to more than treble to reach 100,000.
From Aug.16, adults in England who have received both doses of a coronavirus vaccine will no longer need to self-isolate if they are in close contact with a positive case, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said.
Instead they will need to take a test and isolate only if they are found to be positive, he told parliament.
The same rules will apply to under 18s, who are notyetreceivingvaccinationsinbritain,javidadded.
That highly contagious Delta variant now accounts for nearly all new COVID-19 cases in Britain, and daily infection rates have soared to nearly 30,000 in recent days.
Javid said that figure was likely to reach 50,000 a day by July 19, and as high as 100,000 later in the summer.
But the vaccination campaign has “weakened” the link with hospitalisations and deaths, he stressed to MPS, saying that inoculations are “our wall of defence.” More than 86 per cent of adults in the UK have received at least one jab, with 64 per cent fully vaccinated, according to National Health Service data.
He also responded to media reports that three batches of the Astrazeneca jab made in India have not been approved for use in the EU, potentially hindering summer travel for British recipients of those doses.
Britain has not been using the Covishieldbranded jab made by the Serum Institute of India, and the government is in “intensive discussions” with Brussels on the issue, Javid said.
The world is facing a “two-track pandemic” with some countries being hit by waves of hospitalisation and deaths, compounded by coronavirus variants, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health organisation (WHO), said on Tuesday.
John Ryan, a senior European Commission health official, told a briefing that the bloc hoped to donate a further 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to low and middle income countries by year-end, using the COVAX facility as the main channel.
Germany should lit all remaining coronaviruslinked social and economic curbs as soon as everyone has been offered a vaccine, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas was quoted as saying on Tuesday, suggesting that point should be reached next month.