PM Johnson says the UK is in the ‘race against time’ as it faces the worst pandemic weeks

LONDON (Reuters) – Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday that Britain was in “a race against time” to launch COVID-19 vaccines while deaths reached record levels and hospitals were starved of oxygen. were imminent.

A new, more communicable variant of the disease is now popping up in the population, with one in 20 people in parts of London infected, threatening to overburden the National Health Service (NHS) as hospitals become full.

The death toll in the UK has increased and now exceeds 81,000 – the fifth largest official figure in the world – while more than three million people have tested positive.

In an attempt to overcome the pandemic and try to restore some degree of normality by spring, Britain is launching its largest vaccination program, with vaccines that will be offered to some 15 million people by the middle of next month.

“It is a race against time because we can all see the threat our NHS faces, the pressure it is suffering, the demand in intensive care units, the pressure in ventilated beds, even the lack of oxygen in some places,” Johnson said on a visit to a vaccination center in Bristol, southwest England.

“This is a very dangerous time. The worst thing for us now is to allow the successful launch of a vaccine program to generate any kind of complacency about the state of the pandemic. “

The government’s chief medical advisor, Chris Whitty, said earlier that the situation would deteriorate.

“The coming weeks will be the worst of this pandemic in terms of numbers on the NHS,” he told BBC TV.

“I think that anyone who is not shocked by the number of hospitalized people who are seriously ill and who are dying during the course of this pandemic has not understood anything. This is a terrible situation, ”he told BBC TV.

VACCINATION TARGET

Health Minister Matt Hancock said there are now more than 32,000 patients with COVID-19 in the hospital, far more than the approximately 18,000 hospitalized during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in April.

The Johnson government is pinning its hopes on a mass vaccination program after Britain became the first country to approve vaccines developed by Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer / BioNTech. He also approved Moderna’s photo last Friday.

His plan, announced on Monday, calls for the delivery of two million vaccines to about 2,700 centers a week in England by the end of January, with the aim of immunizing tens of millions of people by spring and all adults with vaccine until autumn.

The first daily vaccination statistics showed that about 2.3 million people had received their first doses of the COVID vaccine so far and almost 400,000 received a second dose.

Johnson said that more people received the vaccine in Britain than in any other European country, but admitted that inoculating 15 million people at the four highest risk levels, including people over 70 and healthcare professionals ahead, until February 15th was “a great request”.

“We believe it is possible, we are going to launch absolutely everything to get it done,” he said.

Labor opposition leader Keir Starmer, who has repeatedly accused Johnson of being too slow to respond to the pandemic, said the prime minister’s indecision had cost lives and exacerbated the economic impact

Ministers and heads of health pleaded with the British to stay home, amid fears that some people are not strictly abiding by the rules, along with concerns that the virus is spreading in supermarkets.

Hancock said that support bubbles, in which families can “bubble” with others if they are single or meet other criteria, would be maintained, but that the rules on exercising with someone else could be restricted.

“Where we have to restrict them, we will,” Johnson said of the rules.