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England is about to take a huge bet.
On Monday, July 19, the country imposes all other restrictions related to the pandemic. People will be able to go to nightclubs, or gather as many groups as they want. They will not be legally forced to wear masks and can stop social distances. The government, looking at media coverage, has declared it a “Freedom Day” and said the removal of security measures will be irreversible.
At the same time, coronavirus cases are growing rapidly in the UK. He registered more than 50,000 new cases on Friday and his health minister he says the daily figure for new infections could rise to more than 100,000 in the summer.
In theory, reopening at an increase seems like a combustible mix. But the UK government is betting that this time around will not be the same as the others because of the vaccination program.
Researchers say it is very difficult to predict what will happen in the future because of the many complex and overlapping factors at play. So let’s look at what we know, what we don’t know, and what we need to see in the coming weeks.
What we do know: vaccines are working
The UK vaccination program is still up and running, but has been very successful so far. In total, 52% of the adult population is fully vaccinated, and about 87% of adults have received the first dose (which includes 52% of those who have had two doses). 6% of Britons are hesitant about getting a shot Office for National Statistics.
There are still many reasons to be nervous. The country is months away from fully integrating all the adult population. Young people are particularly vulnerable; Those over 18 have only just started receiving their first doses, and only a quarter of 18- to 39-year-olds have had two shots. Unlike in the US and Europe, the UK has not started introducing children.
“That’s dangerous,” says evolutionary virologist Emilia Skirmuntt. “We need to get urgent vaccinations with teens, especially before we go back to school in September.”
This is important because right now the main strain of covid-19 in the UK is the delta variant. Although fully vaccinated people have relatively little reason to worry about delta, both Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines offer more than 90% effectiveness against hospitalization, according to data Public Health England—Variation is bad news for those who have had a single shot or no vaccine.
It is about 60% more contagious than the alpha variant that was prevalent in the UK before, and hospitalization is almost double that. Scottish public health organization. A single dose of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccine is only 33% effective against the delta variant, 50% in the case of alpha, the data says Public Health England.
“Reopening will bring a lot of preventable damage,” says clinical epidemiologist Queen Mary of the University of London Deepti Gurdasani. “We should stop relieving it until we offer two doses of the vaccine to all adults and teens.”
What we don’t know: when the cases will go
It is clear that the UK is experiencing another wave of pandemics. What we don’t know is how bad it will be or how the reduction will change. Even the best experts in the field can’t say for sure.
“It is very difficult to know what will happen from 19 July,” says Graham Medley, professor of infectious disease modeling at Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London and a team of scientists advising SPI-M, the UK. pandemic modeling government.
It depends a lot on people’s behavior, which is very difficult to predict. While some will enjoy the new freedoms (the trend was fully demonstrated in the final of the European Football Championship last weekend), others will be much more cautious.
Many people are disappointed that quitting masks is one of the most basic and effective public health measures. Ipsos Mori bat poll they found that a large majority of Britons plan to continue wearing masks in shops and on public transport. If people continue to do so, it could help reduce the spread somewhat: Israel, which also has high vaccination rates, has had to re-establish a mask inside the house in the last month in the face of a surge in cases.
In any case, the chances are likely to continue to rise for at least a few days, if not a few weeks. And that means more hospitalizations and deaths are inevitable, according to Medley. The big question is how far this wave goes.
At a seminar on Thursday, Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said the country could see “quite frightening numbers again” and “could take the problems surprisingly fast again”.
It seems that the government is betting that not all numbers are equally scary. The hospitalization is expected to be low enough to make the National Health Service completely overwhelmed. It is assumed that the link between cases and hospitalization rates has been weakened, if not broken.
“This wave is very different from the previous ones,” says Oliver Geffen Obregon, a UK-based epidemiologist who has worked with the World Health Organization. “The proportion of hospitalizations is lower compared to the points in the previous epidemic curve of the vaccination program.”
But not everyone agrees. The NHS majors are already there sounding the alarm above capacity, and more than 1,200 scientists have signed the letter Lancet arguing that Britain should take care of a huge rise in infections, regardless of death and hospitalization rates.
Epidemiologist Gurdasani is one of them.
“Cases are important,” he says, emphasizing two main risks: the greater the number of people who are more likely to develop long-lived covid and the risk of new variants to avoid vaccines.
What we do know is that more people will be generous for a long time
The UK already has a serious problem with long cobbles. According to the majors, more than two million adults may have or have had complications lasting as long as 12 weeks or more. examination From Imperial College London. But the long cover is misunderstood, with more than 200 symptoms of exhaustion and memory problems, according to the largest study recently published. Lancet.
One in 10 of those who catch Covid-19 goes on to develop a long kovid MOE. This means that if another million people in the UK get sick in this wave – a scenario that is credible by most estimates – there could be another 100,000 people with long-term problems.
Whitty is worried. “I think we’ll get a longer copycat, especially at younger ages, because vaccination rates are much lower now,” he said. he said on July 6th.
This can put tremendous pressure on the NHS, companies and society in general to cause a great deal of unhappiness to a large number of people.
“Some symptoms can last for many years, and there is a chance that an entire generation will be in very poor health for the rest of their lives,” says Skirmuntt.
What we don’t know is whether all of this could lead to another dangerous variant
Many experts fear that the government’s approach will create an ideal breeding ground to create a variant against vaccines.
On July 5, Steve Peterson, director of the Center for Genomic Research at the University of Liverpool, summed up his concerns in a tweet: “Letting a virus be extracted from a partially embedded population is an experiment I would evolve. A virus capable of preventing immunity.”
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