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LONDON (AP) – The UK recorded more than 50,000 new cases of coronavirus for the first time in six months on Friday amid a warning from the UK government’s top medical adviser that the number of people hospitalized with COVID- 19 could reach “pretty scary” levels within weeks.
Government figures showed an additional 51,870 laboratory-confirmed cases, the highest daily number since mid-January. Infections have increased in recent weeks, mostly in unvaccinated young people, due to the much more contagious delta variant and the continued easing of lockdown restrictions.
Despite the increase, the UK government plans on Monday to lift all remaining legal restrictions on social contact in England and to drop social distancing guidelines as well as the legal requirement for people to wear masks in most settings. interiors, including shops, trains, buses and subways.
The government hopes the rapid rollout of vaccines will limit the number of people who fall seriously ill – a position some leading international scientists at an “international emergency summit” called “unwise”.
The group, which includes advisers from the Italian, New Zealand and Taiwanese governments, said they had joined forces out of “a sense of urgency” to warn of the global consequences of the rapid spread of the delta variant to across the British population.
Scientists have warned that the combination of a high prevalence of infection and high levels of vaccination “creates the conditions under which a variant immune evasion is most likely to emerge.”
One of the co-signers of Friday’s statement, Dr William A. Haseltine of the New York-based think tank Access Health International, went further, describing the apparent herd immunity strategy as “murderous” and “inadmissible. “.
Families representing large numbers of people who have died from COVID-19 in the UK have also joined in criticism of the Conservative government’s plan.
“The overwhelming scientific consensus is that lifting the restrictions on Monday will be disastrous, and bereaved families know firsthand how tragic the consequences of unlocking too early can be,” said Jo Goodman, co-founder of Covid- 19 Bereaved Families for Justice. “There is a real fear that once again government thinking will be guided by what is popular rather than the interests of the country.”
Other parts of the UK – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – are taking more cautious steps to come out of the lockdown.
So far, the number of people hospitalized with illnesses linked to the virus and who subsequently died remains relatively low, certainly compared to the peak of the second wave of the pandemic earlier this year.
But with the government warning the country that the number of daily cases could rise to more than 100,000 this summer, concerns are clearly growing. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has sought to curb any euphoria surrounding the lifting of restrictions on Monday, an occasion labeled “Freedom Day” on social media.
Johnson urges people to remain vigilant when meeting other people and to continue to wear masks in closed and overcrowded places.
Its chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, told a webinar hosted by the Science Museum in London on Thursday evening that the UK was “not out of the woods yet”.
“I don’t think we should underestimate the fact that we could get into trouble again surprisingly quickly,” Whitty said.
More cases will inevitably result in more people needing hospital care, even though the rollout of the vaccine has helped create a wall of immunity around those considered most vulnerable to the disease. More than two-thirds of UK adults have received both doses of a vaccine and almost 88% have received one.
Government data on Friday showed 3,964 people hospitalized with COVID-19, the highest number since the end of March. Although the number has risen steadily in recent weeks, it remains well below that of the strongest in the second wave in January, when hospitals admitted around 40,000 COVID-19 patients.
Along with the increase in hospitalizations, daily deaths linked to the virus have reached levels not seen since March. Another 49 deaths linked to the virus were recorded on Friday, bringing the UK total to 128,642, the seventh highest in the world.
Government medical adviser Whitty has warned that the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 is doubling every three weeks or so and could reach “pretty frightening numbers” if the current trend continues.
“We’re not out of the woods on this yet. We are in much better shape thanks to the immunization program, the drugs and various other things, ”he said.
“But it has a long way to go in the UK, and it is even more so globally,” he added.
One potential implication of the large spike in cases – for much of the spring, UK cases hovered around the 2,000 mark – is that it may overwhelm England’s efforts to track people’s contacts. infected with the virus, including the application which is widely used and which has come under criticism in recent days.
“I don’t imagine that tracking and traceability will work much longer,” said James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute at the University of Oxford. “Neither it nor the app was designed for 100,000 cases in a highly vaccinated population.”
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