The UK sees daily deaths from COVID, and hospitals in London are just around the corner

LONDON (Reuters) – The UK has recorded the highest daily death toll since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on Friday, as London declared a major incident, warning that its hospitals could be overwhelmed.

With a new highly transmissible variant of the virus growing in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shut down the economy and rushed vaccines faster than the country’s European neighbors, in an attempt to stop the pandemic.

The UK has the fifth-highest official death toll from COVID-19, at nearly 80,000, and the 1,325 deaths reported within 28 days of a positive test on Friday surpassed the previous daily record last April.

“Our hospitals are under greater pressure than at any other time since the beginning of the pandemic, 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 need to take action to protect it, so that our doctors and nurses can continue to save lives and vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible. possible.

Another 68,053 cases of COVID-19 were reported – also a new daily level – which means that almost three million people have now tested positive for the disease in the UK, which has a total population of around 67 million.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, from the opposition Labor Party, said that the hospital beds in the capital will be exhausted in the next few weeks, because the spread of the virus has been “out of control”.

“We are declaring a major incident because the threat this virus poses to our city is in a time of crisis,” Khan said.

The designation “major incident” is usually reserved for serious attacks or accidents, in particular those which may involve “serious injury, damage, disturbance or risk to human life or well-being, essential services, the environment or national security”.

The last “major incident” in London was the fire in Grenfell Tower in a tall residential building in 2017, when 72 people died.

VACCINE CARE

Khan said there were parts of London where 1 in 20 people had the virus. Pressure on the ambulance service, which now handles up to 9,000 emergency calls a day, has meant firefighters are being recruited to drive vehicles and are following police officers.

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

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

The United Kingdom, the first country to approve vaccines made by Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca, approved on Friday the shooting of Moderna, which it hopes to administer this spring. It also agreed to purchase another 10 million doses of Moderna.

However, Transport Minister Grant Shapps said there were fears that some vaccines might not work properly against a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus that has appeared in South Africa.

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

A laboratory study conducted by the American doctor Pfizer, which has not yet been evaluated by experts, indicated that the vaccine he makes, developed by the German company BioNTech, works against a key mutation in the new variants found in Great Britain and Africa. South.