Immunity in the UK – and it feels good
When London’s Science Museum reopens next week, it will have some new artifacts: empty vaccine vials, testing kits and other items collected during the pandemic, to be featured in a new Covid-19 exhibition.
Britain isn’t quite ready to consign the coronavirus to a museum – the outbreak is far from over. But there is a definite feeling that the United Kingdom has turned a corner, and the mood in the country is jubilant.
Thanks to an efficient vaccine rollout programme, Britain is finally saying goodbye to months of tough lockdown restrictions.
Starting tomorrow, all restaurants and bars in England can fully reopen, as can hotels, theatres and museums. And Britons will be able to hug friends and family again in public, with the easing of social distancing rules that have been in place since the pandemic began.
It’s the biggest step yet to reopen the country following an easing of the crisis blamed for nearly 128,000 deaths, the highest reported Covid-19 toll in Europe.
Deaths in Britain have come down to single digits in recent days. It’s a far cry from January, when up to 1477 deaths a day were recorded amid a brutal second wave driven by a more infectious variant first found in Kent in southeastern England.
New cases have plummeted to an average of around 2000 a day, compared with nearly 70,000 a day during winter.
Since then, British health officials have raced to get ahead of the virus by vaccinating hundreds of thousands of people a day at hospitals, football pitches, churches and a racecourse. As of this week, about 35.7 million people – approximately 68 per cent of the adult population – have received their first dose. Over 18 million have had both doses.
It’s an impressive feat, and many credit Britain’s universal public health system for much of the success. It is able to target the whole population and easily
identify those most at risk because almost everyone is registered with a local, state-employed general practitioner.
That infrastructure, combined with the government’s early start in securing vaccine doses, was key. British authorities began ordering millions of doses from multiple manufacturers last year, striking deals months ahead of the European Union, and securing more than enough vaccine to inoculate the entire population.
David
Salisbury, a former
director of the government’s immunisation programme and a fellow at London’s Chatham House think tank, added that Britain also has the edge because of its track record in successfully rolling out other vaccines, such as the seasonal flu shot.
Many of those who accuse the government of poorly managing the outbreak last year say the UK is finally doing something right.
But Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is worried
that too many people may throw caution to the wind too soon.
Young people, who run a much lower risk of serious illness but can still spread the virus, are not included in the vaccination programme. Official figures also show significant gaps in vaccine uptake among minorities and poor people.
McKee and many others are also concerned about the variants of the virus that are turning up. That risk is especially worrying as the UK slowly reopens to foreign tourists.