Britain’s Gamble on Few Virus Restrictions is being tested by increases in infections, deaths

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Fri, 2021-10-22 10:29 — mike kraft

LONDON — For the last four months, Britain has run a grand epidemiological experiment, lifting virtually all coronavirus restrictions, even in the face of a high daily rate of infections. Its leaders justified the approach on the grounds that the country’s rapid rollout of vaccines had weakened the link between infection and serious illness.

Now, with cases, hospital admissions and deaths all rising again; the effect of vaccines beginning to wear off; and winter looming, Britain’s strategy of learning to live with the virus is coming under its stiffest test yet.

New cases surpassed 50,000 on Thursday, an 18 percent increase over the last week and the second time cases have broken that psychological barrier since July. The number of people admitted to hospitals rose 15.4 percent over the same period, reaching 959, while 115 people died of Covid-19, an increase of almost 11 percent.

“Everything is hitting us at once,” said Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London who has been leading a major study of Covid-19 symptoms. “My view is that we’re in a no man’s land.”

The sudden resurgence of the virus is a rude jolt for a country that believed it had put the worst of the pandemic behind it. After a remarkably successful vaccine deployment and a characteristically British resolve to get on with it, Britons have been brought up short, vexed by a virus that isn’t ready to relinquish its grip.

At issue is the core trade off British officials made last summer: They decided they could tolerate a widely circulating virus as the price of reopening the economy, so long as only a small fraction of infected people ended up in the hospital.

That laissez-faire approach has been watched by the United States and other European countries as a possible model for how to plot a way out of the pandemic. Britons have enjoyed a return to normalcy unseen in the rest of Europe, packing nightclubs, theaters, and sports stadiums — with face masks few and far between.

The percentage of infected people who are later hospitalized is still much lower now than it was during the last peak of the pandemic in January, about 2 percent compared with 9 percent. But the National Health Service is already feeling the strain, and with fears of a virulent flu season, hospitals face the prospect of a double-whammy this winter.

There is also evidence that more vaccinated people are getting infected, a shift from a few weeks ago, when the bulk of infections occurred in schoolchildren, according to Professor Spector’s Zoe Covid Study. The government sent students back to school in September largely unvaccinated and without requiring them to wear face masks. ...

ALSO SEE: England's COVID prevalence rises to new highest level since January, statistics office says

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