UK records record daily deaths from COVID, London hospitals on the brink

LONDON (Reuters) – The UK recorded the highest number of daily deaths on Friday since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when London declared a major incident, warning that its hospitals were at risk of becoming overwhelmed.

With a new, highly transmissible variant of the virus emerging in Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shut down the economy and is distributing vaccines faster than the country’s European neighbors in an attempt to contain the pandemic.

Britain has the world’s fifth largest number of official deaths from COVID-19 at nearly 80,000, and 1,325 deaths reported within 28 days of a positive test on Friday exceeded the previous daily record last April.

“Our hospitals are under more pressure than at any time since the pandemic began, and infection rates across the country continue to rise at an alarming rate,” Johnson said in a statement.

“The NHS (National Health Service) is under severe pressure and we must take steps to protect it, so that our doctors and nurses can continue to save lives and so that they can vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible.”

Another 68,053 cases of COVID-19 have been reported – also a new daily high – meaning that nearly three million people have tested positive for the disease in the UK, which has a total population of around 67 million.

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 this virus poses to our city is in crisis,” said Khan.

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 CONCERN

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.

London, which competes with Paris for the status of the richest city in Europe, has a population of over nine million.

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, which it hopes to start administering this spring. He also agreed to buy another 10 million doses of Moderna.

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 .