On Monday, the UK government lifted almost all pandemic-related restrictions. Boris Johnson has used as a rationale for this action that there has been a relatively high rate of vaccination in the UK when compared to other European nations, with 87.9% having received at least one dose and early 68% receiving two doses.
England has lifted most of its domestic COVID-19 restrictions, marking a milestone as the country moves into a new phase of pandemic life — what some have dubbed “Freedom Day.”
Young people gathered at nightclubs just after midnight to celebrate the return of crowds to raucous indoor spaces. “This is what life’s about,” one clubgoer said.
The move to phase four of the country’s reopening plan means there are no limits on the size of social gatherings or events, and social distancing is no longer required. The government still recommends meeting outdoors when possible.
Requirements to wear face coverings have been lifted, though masks are still recommended in crowded areas such as public transport. They are required on the London Tube. And the government is no longer instructing people to work from home if possible, though it anticipates a gradual return to the office.The odd thing is that it did this at the very time when it is an outlier in terms of the rising number of covid-19 cases, outstripping in absolute terms even the US, India, and Brazil, the countries that have the most total number of cases, despite those countries having much larger populations. And the UK numbers are rising faster too.
But the problem is that in the UK, the current new cases per day is over 47,000, up from a low of just 1,500 in mid-May, an increase of a whopping factor of 30. It is approaching the previous peak of 60,000 per day back in January. By comparison, in the US the numbers rose from a low of around 11,300 on June 23 to 37,000 today. India and Brazil’s numbers today are similar to those of the US.
The number of infections has affected a lot of UK life.
Johnson was just one of many Britons pushed into isolation after pings on their cellphones informing them they’d been exposed to someone positive for the coronavirus. Businesses across the U.K. faced labor shortages due to more than half a million people in a week receiving such pings and the recommended self-isolation measures.
Meanwhile France is also seeing a rapid rise in infections but in contrast to the UK, it has increased restrictions in response.
A COVID health pass is from Wednesday required to visit leisure and cultural venues across France as the country battles a new surge in infections.
The pass attests that the holder has either been fully vaccinated, has tested negative over the previous 24 hours or that has recovered from COVID during the previous six months.
The new measure was announced last week by President Emmanuel Macron in a bid to boost vaccinations. The pass will also become mandatory to visit bars, restaurants, shopping centres, nursing homes as well as to travel on public transport for long-distance trips come early August.
Its roll-out comes a day after the country recorded 18,181 new infections in 24 hours — more than double the figure from just a week ago.
Health Minister Olivier Véran told French MPs on Tuesday afternoon that “we were yesterday at 18,000 contaminations over 24 hours only” when fewer than 7,000 were observed a week ago.
Véran attributed the rise to the Delta variant, which was first detected in India.
“This means that we have an increase in the circulation of the virus of the order of 150% over a week: we have never experienced this, neither with (the original strain of) Covid, nor with the English variant, nor with the South African nor with the Brazilian one,” he said.
Vaccines do not provide 100% protection and so one should not assume that anything goes as long as one is vaccinated. One still needs to exercise some restraint and judgment. This website enables you to calculate the relative risk of being infected in a variety of situations.
As a result of concerns with the rising rates in the US of the Delta variant, I have now started wearing a mask when playing bridge at the bridge center because of the fairly large number of people present (about 30), even though everyone is required to show proof of vaccination before being allowed to enter the large ventilated room. It is a bit of a nuisance but I think we all have to do our part to try and curb the rates of infections.
The least-moronic rationale I can come up with is that the point of the current English[1] “strategy” is to make sure that everyone who is vaccinated gets Covid before the summer is over; with the hope being that this will lead to full immunity for everyone (who is still alive) when autumn comes.
[1] Wales and Scotland have kept various restrictions in place.
The more people infected means a greater chance of yet more variants evolving. Two CoE priests of my acquaintance who live in the US have chosen *now* to visit family in the UK. Will people never learn? I wear a mask whenever I’m in a store or other public place. This is far from over.
We just moved back to England from Texas, and as far as I can see the mask wearing is as bad in one as the other*.
What’s interesting, though is the number of stores that still ‘politely’ require masks.
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* as is the driving, but that’s for an entirely different post.
That’s of the adult (18+) population. It’s been decided (wrongly) not to vaccinate those under 18 except in a few special cases.
I guess you meant “unvaccinated”. That rationale has indeed been given, but it’s still moronic. The delta variant was already spreading rapidly before the removal of restrictions -- Johnson (and to a lesser extent Sturgeon) has thrown gasoline on the fire. There’s still nearly a third of the adult population who have not been fully vaccinated, and a population which includes enough unvaccinated people to maintain transmission (children included -- they are unlikely to die or get seriously ill but do transmit the infection), but also a lot of vaccinated people, provides ideal conditions for the emergence of a vaccine-resistant strain. And there’s no guarantee that one more dangerous for children will not emerge. Vaccinating everyone who can be vaccinated as quickly as possible, given the very low risk of serious side-effects, is the only rational approach. But the so-called “Covid Recovery Group” of Tory MPs, (the “Conservative Friends of Covid” as I call them) and various business interests are getting their way.
Correction to the second-dose uptake stats: It’s now (22 July) 69.2%, but that refers to over-18s. The only under-18s who will have received one or two jabs will be a minority, mainly those with particular health conditions or living with someone who has those conditions. So one-third of our adult population is not fully protected, nearly all under-18s are not protected at all.
In short, we’re only half-way there and have thrown out our emergency brakes. And the Delta variant is fairly successful at infecting even fully vaccinated people. Fewer may be dying than before, but the long-term impacts are still highly concerning and, so far, unclear.
There is an additional wrinkle to all of this.
Majority of the initial jabs in the UK is AZ. The perceived distribution kerfuffle of AZ for the rest of the EU, and then the panic about blood clotting, has severely reduced the percentage of jabs being AZ in the EU. The result is that the UK has a vaccinated population with a higher percentage of people that can still get and/or transmit COVID. Likely the reason that they are running a trial (COV-Boost) to see the effects of a 3rd jab.
The reason is Boris Johnson. Johnson has now clearly been shown to have been the reason behind our failure to lock down in September 2020, leading to 80,000 deaths in our second wave of Covid. from October 2020 to March 2021.
He’s now the cause of our premature opening up while cases are rising rapidly.
There is one bit of hope on the horizon: The number of new cases per day appears to have been be falling slightly over the past week. Perhaps we’ve reached herd immunity between vaccinations and actual cases of disease.
We’ll see over the next couple of weeks.
” even though everyone is required to show proof of vaccination before being allowed to enter the large ventilated room.”
Please keep in mind that, in the US, anyone can easily make or buy a fake vaccination certificate. Proof of vaccination is going to be very leaky -- in parts of the country with extreme vaccine denial, some places may have as many fake certificates presented as real ones.
If the fire department operated like way too many governments right now, they’d put out about half the fire then declare the job done and leave.
It is difficult to know what to make of the situation here, really.
Yes, the case numbers are going up somewhat. Though that is predicted to level off soon. But the numbers of hospitalisations and deaths are tiny compared to what they were when we were last at these levels in January. The chances of fully vaccinated people -- two thirds of us -- getting anything more serious than mild flu for a couple of days are very low. But, of course, there is still the risk to the unvaccinated and the possibility of further variants emerging. Though nobody ever seems to be able to quantify that possibility to the extent we can make a decision about how to deal with it.
There is also the fact that, really, most restrictions have been lifted for a while now. Since May the 17th when the majority of the real limitations were relaxed.. The “opening up” this Monday was letting go of the remaining restrictions, but there weren’t many left. Masks on public transport and hospitality venues having to operate at half capacity were really the only major ones. There wasn’t a lot you couldn’t do last weekend that you can do now. Which may mean that the opening up on the 17th of May was unhelpful. And the schools have now broken up for the Summer, meaning one major source of cross-contamination is no longer an issue. Whether that will have an effect and what it will be is difficult to say.
It does make me wonder whether something like this rise in case numbers would be inevitable whenever we opened up and got back to normal, whatever we did. If so, we might be best off getting it out the way now, in the summer? I can see the logic there, but are the presuppositions valid? I don’t know.
What will the final exit from all this look like? Should we wait until we reach 100% vaccination rates before opening up? 90%? What? Or should we just not open up again at all and rework our entire lives around these pandemic restrictions for ever? I don’t know the answer here, but it is important to think about these things.
I mean, I despise Boris Johnson and the Tories as much as anyone. But it would be hubristic of me to pretend that I would be any better at running things and am informed enough to critique their decisions in detail. There is almost certainly pressure from industry leaders to get back to production, but there are also real epidemiological questions that the answers to are somewhat opaque, even for the experts.
I worry that I am in danger of falling into easy and convenient ways of thinking here. It would be very easy to assume we’re all doomed and chalk all this up to Tory greed and incompetence, because that fits with my preconceptions. It would also be easy to presume that it’s more or less all for the best and things will get better anyway thanks to the vaccine rollout, both because that would be an appealing outcome and because I am very favourably disposed to our NHS and trust that their attentions will see us through.
Ah, that excellent right wing skill of not learning from mistakes. The Dutch government did exactly the same a few weeks ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/12/eu-nations-reimpose-covid-measures-as-cases-surge
Given the American notpology culture I should add that PM Rutte is the world champion at saying sorry for the mistakes he had to admit (far less for the many mistakes he could get away with). What’s not in the article is that Rutte “reimposed curbs” about three days too late -- anyone following covid-statistics predicted this crisis on Monday; those curbs were reimposed on Friday.
The infection numbers were not “going up somewhat”; they exploded, so that the daily numbers set a new records. The good news is that relatively few people were hospitalized and thus even fewer were taken to the IC. So vaccinations help. The bad news is that we’re by far not done yet with corona.
To decrease the probability of dangerous mutations first priority right now should be vaccinating as many people all over the world as quickly as possible. Unfortunately hardly an American seems to realize this; the current president in this respect doesn’t make a difference compared to his predecessor, as expected. Not that the EU is doing any better. When the pandemy is over we’ll likely see that China has gained global influence. Anyone who is OK with this or even think it good news, ask the Uyghurs.
@6, so, if getting the AZ vaccine is on the decline, what did most of that 87.9% of adults who were vaxxed get? Or, do you mean that the rest of the adults are not willing to get AZ and so remain unvaxxed?
I’m keeping on masking in public as well. It is just so easy and not at all inconvenient: it’s about as difficult as putting on and wearing one’s underpants (and, for those who don’t know, it’s a lot easier and more convenient than putting on and wearing a bra.) And, now is the time, perhaps one of the last times, that there’s a high chance of getting the virus. While it’s still ciruclating in such a large number of people worldwide, nothing is over.
I would really prefer not to be even mildly sick, and when it comes to perhaps a 5% chance of long COVID, which may be for years or for life? I will mask any day over that.
sez cartomancer @10:
cubist, #14
The only way we would not see a rise in case numbers upon removing prophylactic restrictions is if we were to keep all the lockdown measures in place until herd immunity were achieved. It is possible that the maximum feasible vaccine uptake will achieve that, but there are no guarantees. Whether the people would put up with being kept under lockdown conditions until… September? December? I don’t know. I have my doubts.
Short of that scenario, there will be a rise in cases. None of the vaccines are 100% effective and there will be numbers of unvaccinated people. The question then becomes how dangerous this rise in cases is. If it results in maybe a handful of deaths each day then maybe that is tolerable given the usual background mortality rates?
cartomancer:
The phrase “rise in cases” is confusing. If that only means the total goes up, meaning the number of new cases is positive and not zero (and obviously not negative), that’s different from saying that there is an increase in the rate of new cases per unit time.
In the UK recently, the number of new confirmed cases per day has been rising pretty dramatically, since the end of May or so, as you can see here. The rate is nearly the highest it’s ever been, which you can see is a peak in December/January. (So, it’s not merely that “the total went up,” as that phrase might be interpreted.)
If more were vaccinated, infections may have accelerated somewhat after easing certain restrictions, but not so much as what you’re experience there now. And that’s not due to “herd immunity,” but because the vaccines do provide some degree of protection against both infection and transmission (as well as severe illness or death).
Well, I also have my doubts that they have very strong preferences for long-term illness and/or death. Indeed, that seems to have priority, at least for most people. And as Matt G pointed out in #2, the longer we drag this out, the more likely it is is that newer strains will hit even vaccinated populations much harder.
consciousness razor, #16
Well yes, indeed, a more vaccinated population would mean a less significant rise in cases. But at what point do we say we’re vaccinated enough to remove the restrictions? It’s now about 90% with both doses and 70% with one. Is that not vaccinated enough? How much of a reduction compared to what is happening now are we looking to create?
Obviously a 100% reduction, such that there is no increase at all, would require herd immunity levels of vaccination. And we don’t know what that is for covid yet. For measles it is well above 90%. I don’t know if we actually can achieve that kind of coverage for the population. But it’s certainly one goal to aim for. We could try to do it that way, as I said. That might have been the best way. I don’t know. But, from what I observe of the British people, substantial numbers of them would not put up with an extension of the kind of measures we had in January well into the Autumn. It does not seem a realistic possibility to entertain.
The thing is, the daily case rates may be rising at alarming levels, but the daily death rates are not. They are nothing like they were with a similar case rate back in January. A touch higher than they were in April, but still only double figures for the whole country. Is that an acceptable death rate? I don’t know. What is an acceptable death rate? Is one per day too many? What other things we have no restrictions on kill that many people? I guess it is a matter of judgment.
But if the case rates are very high, while the death rates are very low, doesn’t that mean that the high case rates don’t really matter all that much? Doesn’t that mean that we’ve effectively transformed covid from a very deadly disease to a much milder one for the fully vaccinated? Isn’t that what success looks like? Or is it not fair on those who cannot be vaccinated, and the few for whom they will fail, to think about doing anything before we reach herd immunity levels? But what if we never reach those levels? What is the exit strategy then?
cartomancer:
Lag.
Takes a week or two for infections to become symptomatic, if they do.
Takes a week or two for symptomatic infections to be severe enough to require hospitalisation, if they do.
Takes a week or two (or more) for hospitalised cases to perish, if they do.
Basically, deaths lag infections by roughly 4-5 weeks.
—
Also, what KG wrote above:
“There’s still nearly a third of the adult population who have not been fully vaccinated, and a population which includes enough unvaccinated people to maintain transmission (children included — they are unlikely to die or get seriously ill but do transmit the infection), but also a lot of vaccinated people, provides ideal conditions for the emergence of a vaccine-resistant strain.”
cartomancer:
You have those reversed, and it’s good to note those are a percentage of the adult population (age 18 and older) not of the total population. Kids are something like 20% of the total.
I don’t know. I think some changes (call them “restrictions” if you like) were simply a matter of good public health, which we should seriously consider keeping intact, because the costs don’t really outweigh benefits. I figure some haven’t stopped washing their hands regularly and so forth. In some places, wearing masks (especially if you’re sick and/or at risk) has been common for years. I think some venues should have health authorities on their backs more often, if they try to cram tons of sweaty, diseased people into small, poorly-ventilated rooms. And people should probably be a lot more cautious about those sorts of things, whether or not anyone is forcing them to do so.
Along with stuff like that, I would like to see gain of function research banned worldwide, whether or not it had anything to do with the origins of this pandemic. And I would like better, independent monitoring and safety/security for such labs in the future.
In short, we might actually learn something from this … or we might not. None of that has to be very burdensome or whatever. No doubt some people will complain, as they always do. But I do hope that the general idea of taking infectious diseases very seriously isn’t all but forgotten in a few years. (People are very forgetful too.)
I mean, whenever this is “over” (whatever that means, because it definitely could stay with us for decades if not much longer), I don’t actually want everything to go back to “normal,” if that’s taken to be the way things were before. I often like the idea of real, permanent social changes, because the world’s not an especially great place to be in for many of us. Of course, when it comes to some other things, I think they probably should revert to their earlier state once the dust settles a bit. But this is all just to say that we don’t really have presume that it’s only a matter of time before that happens with everything, because that’s purportedly what “the people” want.
Anyway, the goal was for example polio eradication, and in most places around the world, we’ve done exactly that. We didn’t just decide to stop working on it because we got some percentage along the way and called that “good enough.” That hasn’t been an especially short or easy process, but I think it has been a worthwhile one.
Sure. Again, I don’t have any very definite answers for you about that, and I believe decision-making like this needs to be democratic, so it’s not entirely up to me or my judgment.
I will, however, say that the fact that the UK doesn’t have restrictions on something that kills people isn’t a valid argument for why it shouldn’t have restrictions on a similarly-deadly thing (or even the very same thing). Your country hasn’t exactly been the most exemplary one ever, as I’m sure you agree, so it’s not like we have good reasons in general to use it as a standard.
No, it’s not. Just repeating the point that’s been brought up in this thread several times now: it can transform itself into something more dangerous. If we let it spread, we let it evolve. So becoming complacent about the currently-low death rates (in some places and not others) is just giving yourself a false sense of security. Nothing at all is preventing this from spiraling out of control into something even worse.
@garnetstar(#13): The UK, majority is still AZ. The EU it is Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech or J&J. And how bad it is in the EU? I know of people who straight up refused to get vaccinated when they heard they’d get AZ, they demand(ed) one of the mRNA vaccines.
@Paul Durrant
Case rates falling over the last week may be a result of schools having closed for the summer break last weekend. If, as seems likely, this means that regular tests of schoolchildren are no longer taking place, this will result in a reduction in the number of reported cases. (It would also, I expect, reduce the real rate of new cases, but that would take longer to feed through.) I expect that the abandonment of nearly all restrictions will more than offset any gains from the school break. As you say we’ll see in a couple of weeks.
(I hadn’t noticed the fall, because I’ve been following the rolling average, which has just tipped over into slower growth, and the geographic map, which is published 5 days in arrears.)
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/aug/10/coronavirus-live-news-china-india-arkansas?page=with:block-611296098f089093df87a17c#block-611296098f089093df87a17c