UK passes grim 100,000 dead milestone

A sinister plateau has been crossed on the other side of the Channel. The United Kingdom became the first European country on Tuesday to cross the threshold of 100,000 deaths from Covid-19, the government deploying all its efforts in vaccination to get out of the health crisis aggravated by the variant that has appeared on its soil.

Since Prime Minister Boris Johnson boasted of shaking hands with sick people in hospital in early March, the country, currently re-confined, has been in its third wave of the pandemic, which is much more virulent due to a variant considered to be much more contagious and potentially more deadly.

100,162 dead

According to the daily toll of the Ministry of Health, 1,631 additional deaths within 28 days of a positive test were recorded, bringing the total toll to 100,162 deaths. As elsewhere in the world, the latter is probably underestimated: the number of deaths where Covid-19 is mentioned on the death certificate as a suspect cause, listed by official statistical bodies, exceeded 104,000 in mid-January.

If the number of contaminations, which is close to 3.7 million (+20,089 in 24 hours), has started to ebb thanks to the new confinement, “the peak of the dead” has yet to arrive, warned the chief medical officer for England , Chris Whitty, Friday. The first death was announced on March 5, 2020. The counter has continued to run since, with a record of 1,820 deaths on January 20.

From the start, conservative Boris Johnson has been accused of underestimating the scale of the crisis, confined too late and deconfined too quickly and too hard during the summer, ignoring the advice of scientists. In the spring, his government finally resolved to drastically tighten restrictions, like other European countries, after an alarmist study announcing hundreds of thousands of deaths if no action was taken.

The health authorities then estimated that if the number of deaths could be contained below the 20,000 mark, it would be a “good result”. Also criticized at the beginning for insufficient screening and a shortage of protective equipment for caregivers, then for a very expensive system for tracing failed contact cases, the authorities are now concentrating all their efforts on vaccination.

The UK was the first Western country to approve a vaccine in early December. Faced with the dramatic worsening of the health crisis since then, the authorities have postponed the injection of the second dose to 12 weeks and mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers to speed up the campaign, carried out in mass centers including cathedrals and mosques.

The goal is to administer by mid-February a first dose of vaccine to 15 million people aged over 70 and caregivers, to consider deconfinement and reopening of schools. Since the launch of the campaign in early December, more than 6.8 million people have already received a dose but concern is mounting over the delivery delays in Europe announced by the laboratories Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

“Vaccine nationalism”

The government assures that its program will not be affected by the situation, which nevertheless pushed the European Union to brandish the threat of an export control of products manufactured on its territory. This could include the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, delivered to the UK from Belgium. “Vaccination nationalism is not the right way to proceed,” British Secretary of State for Immunization Nadhim Zahawi said on Times Radio.

To protect itself from the arrival of new potentially resistant variants, the government has decided to strengthen its border, now requiring negative tests and imposing 10 days of quarantine on all arrivals from abroad. He must decide, after a meeting on Tuesday, on the possibility of logging travelers into hotels during their quarantine.