The UK records daily deaths from COVID and London hospitals are on the verge

LONDON (Reuters) – The UK recorded its highest daily death toll since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic on Friday, as London declared a major incident, warning that its hospitals were at risk of being overflowing.

With a new highly transmissible variant of the virus growing in Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shut down the economy and is running vaccines faster than the country’s European neighbors to try to curb the pandemic.

Britain has the fifth highest official death toll in the world for COVID-19, with nearly 80,000, and the 1,325 deaths reported in the 28 days of Friday’s positive test surpassed last April’s previous daily record.

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

“The National Health Service (NHS) is undergoing serious efforts and we must take steps to protect it so that our doctors and nurses can continue to save lives so we can vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible.” .

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

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, of the opposition Labor Party, said hospital beds in the capital would be depleted 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 at a time of crisis,” Khan said.

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

London’s latest “major incident” was the Grenfell Tower fire on a high-rise residential block in 2017, when 72 people died.

VACCINE CONCERN

Khan said there were parts of London where 1 in 20 people had the virus. Pressure on the ambulance service, which now handled up to 9,000 emergency calls a day, caused firefighters to be recruited to drive vehicles and to be followed by police officers.

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 between the week and January 2, the equivalent of one in 50 people.

Britain, the first country to approve vaccines developed by Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca, approved on Friday the shot of Moderna, which is expected to start administering this spring. He also agreed to buy an additional 10 million doses of Modern.

However, Transport Minister Grant Shapps said he feared some vaccines would not work properly against a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus that has emerged in South Africa.

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

A laboratory study by the American drug manufacturer Pfizer, not yet reviewed by experts, indicated that the vaccine it is developing, developed by the German BioNTech, works against a key mutation in the new variants found in Britain and the South. africa.