Coronavirus in the UK: Experts have already asked you …

he United Kingdom is on high alert against the new strain of coronavirus. “The next few weeks will be crucial”, he admitted to BBC this Monday morning, England’s highest medical authority Chris Whitty. Less circumspect, different voices within the National Health Service (NHS) Date of control of the number of infections before hospital capacity is exceeded: between January 18 and 21. “We are much worse than in March. Even if we had vaccinated everyone over 80 today, there would be no change in the number of deaths over the next five weeks. For the number of hospitalizations to decrease, vaccination must reach people over 60 years of age. The situation is very serious, ”he said. The Guardian member of SAGE, the government’s emergency science advisory committee.

With a average of 700 thousand infections per day last week and more than 4,500 deaths between January 6 and 9, the fear of the total lack of control, of hospital corridors saturated with patients, of doctors who must decide who lives and who does not, is felt in the estimates of epidemiologists, in the opinions of medical personnel, in each assessment made by the authorities. A projection of the The Guardian calculates that the real number of infected is much higher than that detected by the test system: one in five English people is infected with a coronavirus.

On Monday, the government said that two million people have already been vaccinated since the show started on December 8, but with the new strain creeping in, it’s a race against time. The UK has approved three vaccines – Pfizer-BioNTech, Oxford-AstraZeneca and, the latest, last week, Moderna. The goal is to vaccinate two million people per week to cover the four main groups at risk – over 70, health and social service workers – by mid-February: a population of nearly 15 million in a little over a month.

The strategy is obviously to save lives and avoid a collapse of the NHS, but also to neutralize the most formidable of hell: the emergence of a new vaccine-resistant mutation. The so-called British strain, B117, has a 50% higher intensity of contagion than previous strains, but falls within the range of vaccines approved so far. “Hopefully the virus does not change much and that the coverage offered by these vaccines is not affected. The danger is that the virus will have the same capacity as the flu, the normal flu, to mutate, ”warns Martin Hibberd of the London Sochool of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

How to avoid collapse?

The vaccination program, new treatments for people infected with the virus, confinement and social respect for rules (social distance, hygiene, etc.) are the main weapons available to the government.

The lockdown – the third nationwide since the start of the pandemic – has shown its effectiveness, but now faces a new problem. As the British strain is more contagious, it will take longer and harder containment to achieve the same impact by reducing the rate of contagion R, the percentage of reproduction of the virus. This rate must be less than one – each infected infects “less” than a person – to project a sustained decline in the number. “Any unnecessary social contact is a potential link in the chain of transmission. We must help the NHS and society by minimizing social contact as much as possible ”, he warned in his interview with the BBC Chris Whitty.

he social conformity is heterogeneous and it depends on many factors. The two most visible are age and employment. The older the age, the higher the compliance with many exceptions: many young people obey the rules, some older people do not and even join anti-vaccine groups. The croissant unemployment is another factor. Like other governments around the world, the UK state has covered a good chunk of the population, but with an unemployment rate that has doubled in the wake of the pandemic, there are cracks. According to Sunday The observer, more than 70,000 households have lost their homes since the start of the pandemic and more than 200,000 have asked for help at the municipal level to avoid becoming homeless. For many, confinement is not an option.

But there is another factor in following the rules: government credibility. That of Boris Johnson had a disastrous year 2020, full of broken promises and ridiculous bragging about the effectiveness of government programs. An example: in April, he promised a test system that would be “world leader”, in September the system had not started and was covered by another promise, “Operation Moonshot”, which planned to test all of the population in December. Boris Johnson came to predict in June a normal Christmas in which we would all be in our arms. None of this happened.

This left as a brake an interaction between government action and social response worthy of a theorem with two complementary theses. The first is that the greater the zigzagging and reversal of government action, the greater the confusion and social disobedience. The second is that the greater the social disobedience, the more the government will zigzag in an attempt to satisfy various sectors and maintain an appearance of social order. “I understand the panic over the accelerated increase in hospitalizations, but the lack of a long-term strategy surprises me,” he said. The Guardian Liam Smeeth, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.