IS THE UNITED KINGDOM'S REOPENING PLAN A BLUEPRINT?

From mid-July, most of the United Kingdom’s COVID restrictions will be lifted.

- JENNIFER LEE

The UK’s ‘Freedom Day’, as 19 July was so declared, was meant to be a symbolic victory over the pandemic that had wreaked so much misery over the past year and a half. Even if one was to be the most backbiting detractor of Boris Johnson’s government, one probably can’t help but hope that this is finally the promised light at the end of the tunnel.

This is also what governments around the world are hoping to achieve, as vaccines have “broken the link between infection and mortality”, as Johnson put it. Nevertheless, the UK’s reopening has been greeted with alarm.

More than 4,000 scientists, doctors, and other healthcare professionals called the reopening a “dangerous and unethical experiment” in an open letter to The Lancet. “An end to the pandemic through population immunity requires enough of the population to be immune to prevent exponential growth of SARS-CoV-2. Population immunity is unlikely to be achieved without much higher levels of vaccination than can be reasonably expected by July 19, 2021,” said the letter, urging the government to “delay complete re-opening until everyone, including adolescents, have been offered vaccination and uptake is high.”

Labour leader Keir Starmer went further, saying that the government was wrong to lift all restrictions, and that it had lost control of the virus. “Lifting all restrictions at once is reckless – and doing so when the Johnson variant is already out of control risks a summer of chaos. We’re heading for an NHS summer crisis,” he said.

PINGDEMIC

Despite the lifting of most restrictions, the government is still recommending people practice self-isolation if they: