British epidemiologist: Another lockdown is unrealistic, the improvement of the situation is remarkable

2021-05-04 21:16

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2021-05-04 21:16

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Further lockdowns in Great Britain are very unlikely, because the progress compared to January is remarkable – assessed Prof. Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist whose models were the basis for the introduction of the first lockdown in March 2020.

Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, told the BBC that a lockdown could not be completely ruled out in the “worst-case scenario” of a new virus variant emerging that would be resistant to current vaccines.

In such a scenario, new restrictions would be possible to increase human immunity to the virus using modified vaccines.

However, as he himself stated, he considers such a scenario to be unrealistic. “Do I think it is likely? No, I don’t think so. I think it is much more likely that we will now be on a steady course of recovery from this pandemic, at least in this country,” he assessed.

He added that the data on declining coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are very encouraging.

“With one caveat – that we need to watch these variants closely and collect more data on them, I am indeed very optimistic about the situation and this optimism has gradually increased over the past three months, from the dreadful situation we were in in January to the remarkably good situation now. ” – He said.

In his opinion, life will begin to return to normal at the beginning of summer.

This opinion is confirmed by further good data on the epidemic from the past day. During that time, the British government reported four deaths from Covid-19 and 1,946 new infections were detected.

This means that 92 deaths have been registered in the last seven days, and this is the first time since last August so that the total number of seven consecutive days was lower than 100. For comparison – there were 146 deaths in the previous seven days, and 184 in the previous On the other hand, in January mentioned by Ferguson, the daily balance of deaths almost every day exceeded 1000.

In turn, the daily number of new coronavirus infections for the fourth day in a row is below 2,000, while in January it exceeded 50,000, and sometimes even 60,000.

Until Monday inclusive the first dose of the vaccine against Covid-19 received 34.67 million people, which is 65.8 percent. adult residents of Great Britain, and the latter – 15.63 million, or 29.7 percent.

From London Bartłomiej Niedziński (PAP)

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