London declares coronavirus emergency “out of control”

LONDON (Reuters) – London declared a major incident on Friday because its hospitals were at risk of being overwhelmed by a highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus, running “out of control” across the UK.

Britain has the fifth worst number of official deaths from COVID-19, with more than 78,000, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson shut down the economy and distributed vaccines faster than its neighbors in an attempt to contain the pandemic.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan of the opposition Labor Party said hospital beds in the capital would end in the coming weeks because the spread of the virus was “out of control”:

“We are declaring a major incident because the threat that this virus poses to our city is in crisis.”

London, which competes with Paris for the status of Europe’s richest city, has a population of over 9 million.

The term “serious incident” is normally reserved for attacks or serious accidents, namely those that may involve “serious damage, damage, disturbances or risks to human life or well-being, essential services, the environment or national security”.

London’s last “big incident” was the fire of the Grenfell Tower in a residential building in 2017, when 72 people died.

VACCINE FEARS

Khan said there were parts of London where 1 in 20 people had the virus. The pressure on the ambulance service, which now handles up to 9,000 emergency calls a day, meant that firefighters were being called on to drive vehicles, and the police would follow them.

The Office for National Statistics estimated that 1.1 million people in England had the coronavirus in the week through January 2, the equivalent of one person in 50.

Britain, the first country to approve vaccines made by Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca, approved the injection of Moderna on Friday, hoping to start administering it this spring. He also agreed to buy 10 million additional doses.

However, transport minister Grant Shapps said there were fears that some vaccines would not work properly against a highly contagious coronavirus variant that emerged in South Africa.

“This is a major concern for scientists,” he told LBC radio.

A laboratory study by the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, still without peer review, indicated that the vaccine it is manufacturing, developed by BioNTech in Germany, works against a key mutation in the new variants found in Great Britain and South Africa .