LONDON (Reuters) – The UK recorded the highest daily death toll since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on Friday, when London declared a major incident and warned that hospitals were in danger of being overwhelmed.
With a highly transmissible new variant of the virus rising across Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shut down the economy and is rushing vaccines faster than the country’s European neighbors in an effort to stop the pandemic.
Britain has the world’s fifth highest official death toll since COVID-19 at nearly 80,000, and the 1,325 deaths reported within 28 days of a positive test on Friday surpassed the previous daily record set last April.
“Our hospitals have been under more pressure than ever since the onset of the pandemic, and infection rates across the country continue to rise at an alarming rate,” Johnson said in a statement.
“The NHS (National Health Service) is under severe pressure and we need to take steps to protect it so that our doctors and nurses can continue to save lives and vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible.”
Another 68,053 COVID-19 cases were reported – also a new daily high – meaning nearly three million people have now tested positive for the disease in the United Kingdom, which has a total population of about 67 million.
London mayor Sadiq Khan of the opposition Labor party said hospital beds in the capital would run out within weeks as the spread of the virus “got out of hand”.
“We are reporting a major incident because the threat this virus poses to our city is at a crisis point,” Khan said.
The term “major incident” is usually reserved for attacks or serious accidents, especially those that could lead to “serious harm, damage, disruption or risk to human life or well-being, essential services, the environment or national security”.
The latest “major incident” in London was the fire at Grenfell Tower in a high-rise building in 2017, which killed 72 people.
TAKE CARE OF VACCINE
Khan said there were parts of London where 1 in 20 people had the virus. The pressure on the ambulance service, which now handled up to 9,000 emergency calls a day, meant firefighters were called to drive vehicles and police officers would follow.
London, which rivals Paris for the status of the richest city in Europe, has over nine million inhabitants.
The Office for National Statistics estimated that 1.1 million people in England had the coronavirus in the week to January 2, the equivalent of one person in 50.
Britain, the first country to approve vaccines from Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca, on Friday approved the injection of Moderna, which it hopes to begin administering this spring. It also agreed to purchase an additional 10 million Moderna doses.
However, Transport Minister Grant Shapps said there were concerns that some vaccines may not work well against a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus that has emerged in South Africa.
“This is a major concern for the scientists,” he told LBC radio.
A laboratory study by the American drug company Pfizer, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, indicated that the vaccine it makes, developed by Germany’s BioNTech, works against one major mutation in the new variants found in Britain and South Africa found it.
Reporting by Michael Holden, Alistair Smout, Andy Bruce and Kate Holton; written by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Gareth Jones