LONDON (Reuters) – Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Monday that Britain is in “a race against time” to roll out COVID-19 vaccines as deaths hit record highs and hospitals ran out of oxygen, and his top medical adviser said that the pandemic was the worst for weeks. threatened.
A new, more communicable variant of the disease is now penetrating the population, with one in 20 people in parts of London now infected, threatening to overwhelm the National Health Service (NHS) as hospitals fill with patients.
The death toll in the United Kingdom has skyrocketed and now stands at more than 81,000 – the world’s fifth highest official toll – while more than three million people have tested positive.
In an effort to overcome the pandemic and try to restore some measure of normalcy by spring, Britain is hastening to its largest-ever vaccination program, with injections to be offered to about 15 million people by the middle of next month.
“It’s a race against time because we can all see the threat our NHS is facing, the pressure on it, the demand in intensive care units, the pressure on ventilated beds, even the oxygen deprivation in some places,” said Johnson on a visit to a vaccination center in Bristol, South West England.
“This is a very dangerous moment. The worst thing for us is that we manage to roll out a vaccine program to cultivate some form of complacency about the state of the pandemic. “
The government’s chief medical adviser Chris Whitty said the situation would worsen.
“The coming weeks will be the worst weeks of this pandemic in terms of numbers at the NHS,” he told BBC TV.
“Anyone who is not shocked by the number of people in the hospital who are currently seriously ill and die during this pandemic, I don’t think understood this at all. This is a terrible situation, ”he told BBC TV.
VACCINATION PURPOSE
Health Minister Matt Hancock said there were now more than 32,000 COVID-19 patients in the hospital, far more than the roughly 18,000 hospitalized during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in April.
Johnson’s government is pinning hopes for a massive vaccination program after Britain became the first country to approve vaccines developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer / BioNTech. It also approved Moderna’s shot last Friday.
The plan, announced Monday, provides for two million injections to be delivered to approximately 2,700 centers per week in England by the end of January, with the aim of immunizing tens of millions of people in the spring and giving all adults a vaccine by the fall. offer.
Initial daily vaccination statistics showed that so far nearly 2.3 million people had received their first dose of a COVID vaccine and nearly 400,000 had received a second dose.
Johnson said more people had received the vaccine in Britain than in any other European country, but admitted that 15 million people in the four highest risk levels, including those of more than 70 and primary care health workers, were ‘a huge demand’ on February 15. used to be. .
“We believe it is achievable, we are going to throw absolutely everything in to get it done,” he said.
Opposition Labor leader Keir Starmer, who has repeatedly accused Johnson of being too slow to respond to the pandemic, said the prime minister’s indecision had cost lives and exacerbated the economic impact.
Ministers and health chiefs have begged the British to stay at home, fearing some people are not following the rules strictly enough, and fears the virus will spread in supermarkets.
Hancock said support bubbles, where households can “bubble” with another if they are single or meet other criteria, would be maintained, but the rules for exercising with someone else could be limited.
“We will do where we need to tighten them up,” Johnson said of the rules.
Additional reporting by Guy Faulconbridge, Kate Holton, William Schomberg, Paul Sandle, Alistair Smout, and James Davey; written by Michael Holden; edited by Estelle Shirbon, Guy Faulconbridge, Angus MacSwan and Gareth Jones