British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks at a televised press conference at 10 Downing Street on February 22, 2021 in London, England.
Leon Neal | Getty Images News | Getty Images
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had good news for the country on Monday after months of lockdown. He said an “unparalleled” vaccination program meant it was “now traveling a one-way street to freedom.”
The easing of the lockdown for England will come in a number of steps and will depend on data at every stage, he said. In the first step, schools in England will reopen on March 8. The latest, scheduled for June 21, will see the removal of all restrictions on mixing and the reopening of all sectors that remain closed, such as nightclubs.
The UK is one of the countries most affected by the pandemic, with the fourth highest number of infections, after the US, India and Brazil. According to data from Johns Hopkins University, it has counted more than 4.1 million cases of coronavirus to date and 120,810 fatalities as a result of the virus.
It saw a surge in the number of cases going into winter as a new, more contagious strain of the virus emerged in the southeast of the country. It has now become the dominant strain of the virus across the country and has been found in numerous countries around the world, along with other more virulent strains of the virus.
A silver lining in the British experience of the pandemic was the response to vaccination. It was the first country in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine, the candidate of Pfizer and BioNTech.
It then approved and began administering the AstraZeneca-University of Oxford shot, a cheaper vaccine manufactured in the UK that is easier to transport and store than competing shots. As of Saturday, more than 17.5 million Britons have received their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, of which more than 600,000 have received both doses, according to government data.
New infections are falling
Data shows that new infections are on the decline, and early studies indicate that coronavirus vaccines also help prevent transmission of the virus and prevent serious illness.
In the past seven days, the UK has seen 77,432 new cases of the coronavirus, a 16.2% drop from the previous weekly count. The number of deaths in the past seven days, 3,414 deaths, is also 27.4% lower than the previous seven-day count. Hospital admissions are also declining.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated soon.
—CNBC’s Holly Ellyatt contributed to this article.