London: When London’s Science Museum reopens next week, it will have some new artifacts. They are empty vaccine vials, testing kits and other items collected during the Covid-19 pandemic. These artifacts will be displayed in a new Covid-19 exhibition. The fact however, is that Britain is reopening with freedom on offer. It is something that has been missing with Londoners for more than a year now.
Britain isn’t quite ready to consign the coronavirus to a museum – the outbreak is far from over here. But there is a definite feeling that the UK has turned a corner. The mood in the country is jubilant. “The end is in sight,” one newspaper front page claimed recently. “Free at last!” read another.
Thanks to an efficient vaccine rollout programme, Britain is finally saying goodbye to months of tough lockdown restrictions.
Starting Monday, all restaurants and bars in England can fully reopen, as can hotels, theaters and museums. And Britons will be able to hug friends and family again in public. The easing of social distancing rules that have been in place since the pandemic began will help them get physically close.
It’s the biggest step yet to reopen the country following an easing of the crisis. The Covid-19 virus claimed 1,28,000 lives, the highest reported toll in Europe.
Deaths in Britain have come down to single digits in recent days. It’s a far cry from January, when up to 1,477 deaths a day were recorded. The figure was recorded amid a brutal second wave driven by a more infectious variant first found in Kent, in southeastern England. New cases have plummeted to an average of around 2,000 a day, compared with nearly 70,000 a day during the winter.
Since then, British health officials have raced to get ahead of the virus. They have vaccinated hundreds of thousands of people a day at hospitals, soccer pitches, churches and a racecourse. As of this week, about 35.7 million people — or approximately 68 per cent of the adult population — have received their first dose. Over 18 million have had both doses.
It’s an impressive feat, and many credit Britain’s universal public health system for much of the success (Is India observing).
Experts say the National Health Service is one of UK’s most revered institutions. It has been able to target the whole population and easily identify those most at risk. This is because almost everyone is registered with a local, state-employed general practitioner.
That infrastructure, combined with the government’s early start in securing vaccine doses, was the key. British authorities began ordering millions of doses from multiple manufacturers late last spring. The government struck deals months ahead of the European Union and securing more than enough vaccine to inoculate the entire population.
“I don’t think it’s surprising that the two countries in the world with probably the strongest primary care systems, which are us and Israel, are doing the best with vaccine rollout,” said Beccy Baird, a policy researcher at the King’s Fund, a charity for improving health care.
“We have the medical records. We can understand where our patients are. We’re not trying to negotiate with loads of different insurance companies. It’s the same standard right through the country,” Baird pointed out.
“Whereas in the United States, it’s going to be harder to really think about how do you reach underserved communities, how do you provide the same access to everybody to this vaccine?” she added.
Many around the world were skeptical about Britain’s decision to delay the second dose by up to 12 weeks to free up vaccine for more people. However, that strategy also paid huge dividends. The two shots of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were intended to be given three and four weeks apart.
Anthony Harnden, an Oxford academic and a top government vaccination adviser, said ‘there were lots of questions asked’. However, ‘we were up against many countries’ who disagreed with spacing out the two doses, but our officials stuck to the plan.
“You have to remember, looking back at that time, there were a thousand or more people dying every day in the UK. So there was a huge imperative to get our vulnerable people vaccinated,” Harnden said. “It was an innovative strategy, a bold strategy, but it was based on our experience of previous vaccines,” he added.
