In the U.K. on Friday Again 53,285 new COVID-19 infections were reported, slightly down from the record level of 55,892 the previous day. Though parallels with the beginning of the disease outbreak are hard considering that in the spring, research was minimal, the U.K. Over the past 4 days, it has registered its four largest daily fresh infection numbers, all above 50,000 and about double the daily number of a few weeks ago.
England’s director of the Royal College of Nursing, Mike Adams, told Sky News that the U.K. It was in the “storm eye” and that it was “infuriating” to see individuals not following instructions or wearing masks for social distance.
A leading doctor also cautioned about burnout in hospitals among health workers on the front line, while also reminding people to obey the law.
“I am worried,” Adrian Boyle, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the BBC. “We are very much at battle stations.”
A modern, more infectious strain of the virus first found around London and the southeast of England is seen as the explanation for the increase in new cases.
There are immense worries about the course of the pandemic over the next couple of months, considering the time gap between new infections, hospitalizations, and COVID-19 deaths. After the other 613 deaths were reported on Friday, Britain has already Europe’s second-highest virus body count at 74,125. The nation looks poised to surpass Italy and yet again becomes a worst-hit European country.
As a consequence of the rise in new infections, which induced even stricter regulations on lockdown. British authorities have changed their strategy for choosing to get more people an initial jab as soon as possible, for rolling out COVID-19 vaccines, and delaying the second shot for up to three months.
The first shot of the vaccine created by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer and the German biotechnology company BioNTech has been received by about 1 million people, with a small number still receiving the second dose after 21 days as expected.
“In the short term, the additional increase of vaccine efficacy from the second dose is likely to be modest. The great majority of the initial protection from clinical disease is after the first dose of vaccine,” the medical officers said.
The new strategy, however, has encountered some criticism. The UK’s main doctors’ union cautioned that delaying the second dose creates enormous scheduling issues for thousands of elderly and disabled people who are partly vaccinated.
“It is grossly and patently unfair to tens of thousands of our most at-risk patients to now try to reschedule their appointments,” said Richard Vautrey from the British Medical Association.
