‘Vaccinate entire world to eradicate Covid-19’
PHE official’s SOS call comes amid a study saying UK cases are doubling every 11 days
LONDON/JAKARTA: A top British government health official has warned that the world will be free from Covid-19 only after the entire global population has been vaccinated against the deadly disease.
Coronavirus variants will continue to emerge and “we will not be through this pandemic until the whole world has the ability to get vaccinated”, Susan Hopkins, deputy director of Public Health England’s (PHE) national infection service, said at a House of Commons science committee meeting.
“And that, realistically, is two years away.”
In England itself, the number of people infected with the coronavirus is increasing rapidly, doubling every 11 days, which coincides with the Delta variant of Covid-19 becoming dominant in the country, a study reported on Thursday.
The Imperial College London led Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT-1) analysis, based on over 100,000 home swab tests taken between May 20 and June 7, estimates that 0.15% of people have the deadly virus, or roughly 1 in 670. It found that the link between infections, hospitalisations and deaths had been weakening since February, but since late April, the trend has been reversing for hospitalisations.
Vaccinated Indonesian health workers get Covid
More than 350 doctors and medical workers have caught the disease in Indonesia despite being vaccinated with Sinovac and dozens have been hospitalised, officials said, as concerns grow about the efficacy of some vaccines against new variants.
Most of the workers were asymptomatic and self-isolating at home, said Badai Ismoyo, head of the health office in the district of Kudus in central Java, but dozens were in hospital with high fevers and declining oxygen saturation levels.