Paramedics work in an ambulance parked in front of Royal London Hospital in East London on January 21, 2021.
DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS | AFP | Getty Images
LONDON – The official death toll in the UK from the coronavirus pandemic reached 100,000 Tuesday, the stark milestone reached as a recent wave of infections continues to weigh on hospitals and emergency services.
According to the latest government data, an additional 1,631 people had died within 28 days of a positive test. To date, the UK has registered more than 3.6 million infections.
Britain has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic that hit the country nearly a year ago. The first two reported cases of Covid-19 were in the tourist town of York in Northern England on January 31, 2020.
Now, a year later, the UK is in its third national lockdown, facing a wave of infections, and subsequent hospitalizations and deaths, caused by a more communicable variant of the virus. The mutation was first discovered in South East England in September 2020, then spread to London and is now responsible for most of the new infections in Britain. This has resulted in more people going to hospital, putting health care under great pressure.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the UK has the fifth highest number of cases in the world, after the US, India, Brazil and Russia. France with about 3.1 million cases, then Italy and Spain, both with about 2.5 million cases each, but the UK has a higher death toll than its European neighbors.
Experts have attributed the UK’s harsh experience during the pandemic to a number of factors, including the later initial blockage, which meant it struggled to gain control of the rapidly spreading virus and hesitation over the next two lockdowns when the cases had already returned started to increase after periods of relaxation. Poor testing and tracking system has also been a factor.
On the positive side, the UK is one of the world leaders when it comes to its coronavirus vaccination campaign. It was the first country to approve and implement the vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech and the vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.
It started its vaccination campaign in early December, weeks before the EU, and has now vaccinated many of its priority groups; elderly and health care workers / nursing homes, and now offers the vaccine to people over 70 and anyone who is extremely vulnerable.
To date, it has vaccinated more than 6.8 million people with at least the first dose of a vaccine.