By Martin Cole-
Scientists in New Zealand have described Britain’s unlocking of Covid restrictions as an “awful experiment.” On Monday Boris Johnson announced plans to scrap a number of coronavirus lockdown measures on July 19, including ditching social distancing and dropping the legal requirement to wear a face mask.
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern has already dismissed the strategy being adopted by UK policymakers, and said that “different countries are taking different choices”.
University of Auckland microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles told Newsroom: “The question is, how much worse is Delta going to get?
“They are running a really quite awful experiment.”
Jemma Geoghegan, (pictured) an evolutionary virologist at the University of Otago, expressed concern that just over half of the UK adult population has been vaccinated and that this could encourage new vaccine resistant variants to be produced.
She told Newsroom: “If you are going to train a virus to escape vaccine-induced immunity, you would do exactly what they’re doing. “You’re basically providing a training ground for the virus to overcome those selection pressures. You’re allowing the virus to continue to spread.
“With this moderately immune population and with the Delta variant that has an R0 that’s estimated to be probably five or six, you need a threshold to be much, much, much higher than they currently have.”
The peak of the current wave is expected around mid-August and could lead to between 1,000 and 2,000 hospital admissions per day, according to government scientists.
Central estimates from modelers advising the government have indicated that Covid deaths are expected to be between 100 and 200 per day at the peak, although there is a large amount of uncertainty.’ For us it’s not freedom day’
New health secretary, Sajid Javid, told the House of Commons cases could reach 100,000 a day later in the summer but he did not believe this would put “unsustainable pressure on the NHS”.
Vaccinations had created a “protective wall”, which would mean we could “withstand a summer wave”, Sajid Javid added.
Boris Johnson later told a Downing Street press conference that coronavirus “continues to carry risks for you and your family”.
“We cannot simply revert instantly from Monday July 19 to life as it was before Covid,” he said.
The prime minister added that he hoped the roadmap would be “irreversible” but “in order to have that, it has also got to be a cautious approach”.
The legal requirement to wear face coverings in some enclosed public places will be removed but Mr Javid said they were still “expected and recommended” in crowded indoor areas.