If you’re worried about society-wide COVID restrictions becoming a permanent feature of life in Europe, here’s a positive development in the United Kingdom:
Boris Johnson took an increasingly hardline approach to ending lockdown on July 19 today, telling the Cabinet the country will have to ‘live with Covid in the future’.
Amid clear signals that ministers are increasingly set on ending draconian restrictions in three weeks come hell or high water, the Prime Minister highlighted that the link between infections and serious illness and deaths has been significantly weakened.
Downing Street said the Cabinet – including new Health Secretary Sajid Javid – ‘agreed that once we have completed the road map, we will be able to live with Covid in the future, even if cases continue to rise, thanks to the protections provided by the vaccine.’
The United Kingdom has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, but the number of cases jumped from 2,000 per day in May to over 16,000 per day in late June.
The Daily Mail notes studies show that, in a society that’s mostly vaccinated, COVID’s infection-fatality rate is now about the same or a bit lower than that of the flu: “A separate study from scientists at Cambridge University found that fewer than one in a thousand people who catch Covid in England now die from the disease. They estimate the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of coronavirus has been driven down to 0.085 per cent thanks to the country’s hugely successful vaccine rollout.”
An analysis conducted by the Associated Press found that unvaccinated people accounted for 99.2 percent of all COVID deaths that occurred in the United States during the month of May.