Throughout Great Britain, the contagion parameter R0 has dropped below 1 and Prime Minister Boris Johnson can breathe a sigh of relief: the vaccination campaign goes ahead quickly, the number of deaths drops, that of new infections is at its lowest. July and the terrible second wave of the epidemic seems to have come to an end. Even «Mr. Lockdown », the epidemiologist Neil Ferguson who suggested one closure after another, has changed his mind: already by May many restrictions can be lifted and it will be possible to go back to having a beer at the pub.
Criticized for not respecting the distancing measures and for having initially relied on illusory herd immunity, the British are performing better than in other European countries, struggling with delays, inefficiencies and shortages of vaccines. In Great Britain, 95% of those over 70 have already been immunized; London city doctors complain that they no longer have elderly patients to administer the dose, and ask not to waste time and vaccines, speeding up procedures for younger ones. After the age of fifty it will be the turn of teachers and policemen and it is likely that long before the end of the year every citizen will have been protected from Covid.
In mid-January there were 1,200 deaths per day in the country, today there are less than 300. The daily cases three weeks ago were 70,000, now they are 15,000. To be really calm it will be necessary to reach less than a thousand infected a day and the goal is still far away. But everything seems to be going in the right direction and Boris Johnson has confirmed the reopening of schools for March 8: the return to a normal life will be slow, but it will still happen in a shorter time than expected. The merit is above all of the success of the vaccination campaign, which has secured the elderly by easing the pressure on the hospitals and on the national health service, which can now deal more successfully with less serious cases and solve them.
As has often happened in its history, Britain needs to be cornered before it can react with strength and determination. Not at all willing to be ordered to what they should do when they were required to stay at home, the British first paid the price for rash choices and then mobilized en masse to contribute to the vaccination campaign. The Daily Mail collected the stories of many of them and among them the one of the volunteer stood out who, finding himself in front of his 80-year-old mother, asked her anyway for a document proving her age and refused to park the car, telling her that it wasn’t the assistants’ job to do such things.
The moment is extremely delicate, because the new mutations of the virus coming from South Africa and Brazil could increase the number of infections again, but the government has decided on very restrictive measures, with high fines and penalties of up to 10 years in prison for who will lie about the country of origin at border controls. A vaccination passport is also being studied, which will allow the British already protected to be able to go on holiday safely next summer in countries such as Greece, which has already announced that it wants to welcome those who can demonstrate that they have freed themselves from Covid with open arms.
Great Britain has so far vaccinated 14 million people, 18.4% of the population, compared to 4.2% in Spain and Italy, 3.9% in Germany and 3.1% in France. Merkel apologized to the Germans, the president of the European Commission Ursula von den Leyen admitted the errors in the ordering of vaccines. Perhaps, to understand how to do it, we need to look at those British people who until now we have only criticized and made fun of, when they said they wanted to leave a Europe that was too inconclusive and messy.
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