English
London: The latest figures from Britain’s official statistics agency show that the prevalence of COVID-19 in the U.K. has reached record levels with about 1 in 13 people estimated to be infected with the virus in the past week.
The Office for National Statistics said on Friday that in the week ending March 26, about 4.9 million people were estimated to have been infected by the coronavirus, up from 4.3 million recorded in the previous week.
The latest surge is driven by the more transmissible Omicron variant BA.2, which is the dominant variant across the U.K.
Although the number of people dying from COVID-19 is still relatively low compared with earlier this year, hospitalizations and death rates are again rising. Nonetheless, the latest estimates suggest that the steep climb in new infections since late February, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson scrapped all remaining coronavirus restrictions in England, continued well into March.
The figures came on the day the government ended free rapid COVID-19 tests for most people in England, under Johnson’s “living with COVID” plan. People who do not have health conditions that make them more vulnerable to the coronavirus now need to pay for tests to find out if they are infected.
“The government’s ‘living with COVID’ strategy of removing any mitigations, isolation, free testing and a considerable slice of our surveillance amounts to nothing more than ignoring this virus going forwards,” said Stephen Griffin, associate professor at the University of Leeds’ Medical School.
“Such unchecked prevalence endangers the protection afforded by our vaccines,” he said. “Our vaccines are excellent, but they are not silver bullets and ought not to be left to bear the brunt of COVID in isolation.”
More than 67% of people 12 years old and above in the U.K. have had their booster or third dose of the coronavirus vaccine. From Saturday, parents can also book a low-dose vaccine for children between 5 and 12 years old in England.
James Naismith, a biology professor at the University of Oxford, said he believed that except for those who are completely shielded or not susceptible to the virus, most people in the country would likely be infected with the BA.2 variant by the summer.
“This is literally living with the virus by being infected with it,” he said.
(With agency inputs)
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