“Let the corpses pile up by the thousands,” Boris Johnson blurted out in his private office, but the door was open and many witnesses heard it. It happened last October, when the second wave of covid-19 was accelerating but the British prime minister was determined not to reintroduce restrictions such as masks or self-isolation to the population.
The corpses have piled up to considerable heights: in the tens of thousands, to be precise. In the five months between November 2020 and March 2021, covid-19 killed 86,049 Britons, most of whom would likely still be alive had Johnson’s government adopted a more current approach to lockdowns.
Undaunted, Johnson is doing the same. On July 19, with the number of new covid-19 cases exceeding fifty thousand per day and doubling every two weeks, Johnson announced the end of all pandemic-related limitations. Go wherever you want, wear a mask or not, do as you like, crowd into bars, hug people or sneeze at them if you like, indoors, outdoors, anywhere, anytime.
Take notes
Other governments watch it, horrified but fascinated. It would be really interesting to know how many more deaths are needed to achieve “herd immunity” in a population that has already been heavily vaccinated. And here comes a guy who is ready to take the risk with his own population. We observe carefully and take notes.
The British population leads the way in vaccination: 88% of adults have received the first dose and 68% have received both. It may already be close to herd immunity, which was generally thought to occur when about 60 percent of the population was vaccinated against the original version of covid-19, but it could settle at around 80 percent or more for the lower variants. recent and infectious.
Or perhaps the latest variants are so infectious that herd immunity is totally unattainable (90 percent or more) for any vaccination schedule. It would be nice to know, but not at the price of spreading death and a long covid among our fellow citizens. And here comes that funny guy Johnson, who is willing to use British citizens as laboratory guinea pigs.
It is plausible to imagine that similar thoughts have crossed the minds of French, US or Korean leaders, but the same is unlikely to have happened to Johnson’s. He is not a man of detail, and it is more likely that he simply found himself in this position by dint of carelessness and pious illusions.
Initially, around March or April, when vaccines were spreading and things seemed to be going well, he promised that “freedom day”, when all restrictions were lifted, would arrive in mid-June. Then the delta variant appeared, wreaking havoc in India.
This suggested two things. The first: that travelers arriving from India had to be kept away from the UK or at least quarantined upon their arrival. The second: that perhaps this was not the time for courageous experiments in dropping the limitations linked to the pandemic. But the tousled blonde-haired man moved on, as he planned a visit to India’s prime minister at the end of April to negotiate the first major trade deal after Brexit.
It would have been difficult to fly to India without allowing Indians to fly to the UK, and so he left the doors open for 17 days after banning travel from Pakistan and Bangladesh (where the infection rate was much lower). This is why almost all new covid-19 infections in the UK are attributable to the delta variant, which is more contagious than others.
The nature of the experiments
In mid-April Johnson closed the doors to Indian travelers and postponed “freedom day” by a month. But he sadly remained true to that date, despite having the terrible example of the Netherlands ahead of him, a country that put an end to all restrictions in late June, only to reintroduce them last week when infections were out of control. . And now the “day of freedom” has arrived in the United Kingdom One.
Britain’s new health minister, Sajid Javid (who just got covid-19), blithely predicts that there could be a hundred thousand new infections a day within a couple of weeks. However, according to what he says, there is no need to worry because “the relationship between infections and hospitalizations or deaths has been broken”.
This is not true, although that relationship has been greatly weakened by the high levels of vaccination in the UK. No vaccine guarantees total immunity, and if daily infections reach or exceed one hundred thousand, even a hospital admission rate of one in a thousand can mean one hundred hospitalizations a day. Johnson is gambling with people’s lives, although it is unclear whether he is really aware of this risk.
On the other hand, it might also get away with it. The intimate nature of the experiments lies in not knowing the result in advance and this is a great and important experiment. If the UK’s level of vaccination really allows a country to fully open up, despite the worst effects of the new variants, it will be good news for everyone.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
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