Booster shots, social rules call

Life has returned to normal for millions in Britain since coronavirus restrictions were lifted over the summer. But while the rules have vanished, the virus hasn’t.

Many scientists are now calling on the government to reimpose social restrictions and speed up booster vaccinations as coronavirus infection rates, already Europe’s highest, rise still further.

The UK recorded 49,156 new Covid-19 cases on Monday, the largest number since mid-July. New infections averaged 43,000 a day over the past week, a 15 per cent increase on the week before.

Last week, the Office for National Statistics estimated that one in 60 people in England had the virus, one of the highest levels seen in Britain during the pandemic.

In July, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government lifted all the legal restrictions that had been imposed more than a year earlier to slow the spread of the virus.

Some modelers feared a big spike in cases after the opening-up. That didn’t occur, but infections remained high, and recently have begun to increase – especially among children, who largely remain unvaccinated.

Also rising are hospitalisations and deaths, which are averaging more than 100 a day – far lower than when cases were last this high, before much of the population was vaccinated, but still too high, critics of the government say.

Some say Britons have been too quick to return to pre-pandemic behaviour. Masks and social distancing have all but vanished in most settings in England, though Scotland and other parts of the UK remain a bit more strict.

Some scientists say a big factor is waning immunity. Britain’s vaccination programme got off to a quick start, with shots given to the elderly and vulnerable beginning in December 2020, and so far almost 80 per cent of eligible people have received two doses. The early start means millions of people have been vaccinated for more than six months, and studies have suggested vaccines’ protection gradually wanes over time.

Millions of people in Britain are being offered booster shots, but critics say the programme is moving too slowly, at about 180,000 doses a day. More than half of the people eligible for a booster dose haven’t yet received one.

‘‘It’s critical we accelerate the booster programme,’’ said epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.

Ferguson said one factor influencing the UK’s high case numbers was that it has relied heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine, ‘‘and, while that protects very well against very severe outcomes of Covid, it protects slightly less well than Pfizer against infection and transmission, particularly in the face of the Delta variant’’.

He also noted that ‘‘most Western European countries have kept in place more control measures, vaccine mandates, mask-wearing mandates, and tend to have lower case numbers and certainly not case numbers which are going up as fast as we’ve got’’.

Scientists in the UK are also keeping an eye on a new subvariant of the dominant Delta strain of the virus. The mutation, known as AY4.2, accounts for a small but growing number of cases in Britain.