What the commentators said

Not long ago, critics abroad were calling the UK “plague island” thanks to our high infection rates, said Camilla Tominey in The Daily Telegraph. British travellers had to jump through extra hoops; our Oxford jab was trashed by European leaders. Now, things look very different: our daily case numbers per 100,000 people are lower than in at least ten European countries; and fatalities are 40% below the EU average. Partly, that’s a result of Britain’s superior vaccine roll-out, said Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail. Even in “clear-thinking” Germany, just 68% of people are fully jabbed: that is more than in some European nations (in Bulgaria the rate is 25%), but far behind the 80% in Britain, which has also administered boosters at three times the rate of the EU average. But our relative success is down to timing too, said Charlotte Gill on Conservative Home. Owing to the “big bang” reopening in July, when cases were still high, large numbers of people acquired immunity naturally through infection in the summer – leaving us well-placed going into winter. The UK’s Covid response has been far from perfect; but the shocking scenes unfolding in Europe suggest that on this, at least, the Government got it right.

That doesn’t mean we can afford to relax completely, said Nicola Davis in The Guardian. Daily cases still regularly exceed 40,000 in Britain (higher than in many Western European countries); and we’re still seeing more than 1,000 deaths each week. With winter yet to fully hit, and the NHS under continuing pressure, “caution remains crucial”. There are inevitably unknowns to consider as we look ahead, said Andrew Lilico on UnHerd, not least the fear that waning immunity levels could lead to a sharp rise in the number of deaths. But with the booster programme progressing well, and highly effective new treatments coming on stream soon, Britain is remarkably well placed as it emerges from the pandemic. Public health officials will of course continue to be concerned about infection levels, “but as a grand policy question, Covid is finished”.