At Paddington station in central London, a mural made of rainbows commemorates ‘the COVID-19 crisis of 2020’. As if the pandemic was just a distant memory.
The virus may be circulating happily among the British population – Prince Charles himself received a positive test two days after visiting Her Majesty Elizabeth II – but the United Kingdom is among the countries most in a hurry to eliminate health measures. .
Three weeks after most restrictions were lifted, Britain’s healthcare system is holding up. But compliance with the few measures still in place seems to be withering a little more each day. At a glance, barely 60% of passengers passing by the rainbow mural at Paddington station deign to wear a face covering. The mask remains compulsory in public transport.
Wearing a mask also seems random in shops. But it is no longer required in restaurants, neither for customers nor for waiters. The vaccine passport has also been eliminated. The government of Boris Johnson is betting that the high rate of vaccination protects the health system against overflows.
The pandemic is no longer making headlines. And when we talk about it, it is to refer to the “resisters” to sanitary measures, like the demonstrators who block Ottawa and the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Canada and the United States.
Obstacles to “freedoms” pass with difficulty in the cradle of parliamentary democracy. Even people infected with the virus will soon be able to carry on business as usual: Prime Minister Johnson promised this week to eliminate the rule forcing people to self-isolate after testing positive for COVID-19.
As in Quebec, the British are divided into two camps in the face of the government’s post-COVID openness strategy: the optimists and the worried – who both consider themselves “realists”.
The abandonment of compulsory isolation in the event of infection thus represents the logical continuation of “life with the virus”, argued Boris Johnson.
Bullshit, argued a group of independent experts which was formed in the spring of 2020: the sudden lifting of health measures is purely political, according to them. The Prime Minister is just trying to save his skin in the wake of the party gatethese parties in which Boris Johnson or other government officials participated during the confinements of 2020 and 2021.
“Cautiously optimistic”
Three weeks after the restrictions were lifted, “it has to be agreed that all the indicators are pointing in the right direction”, underlines Colin Angus, principal researcher at the School of Public Health at the University of Sheffield, in the north of England .
The curves of hospitalizations and deaths continue to drop significantly, despite the lifting of most health measures on January 19, he recalls. As of Friday, the number of patients newly admitted to hospital with COVID-19 is down 10.7% from the seven-day average. The death toll (28 days after testing positive for COVID-19) is down 20% from the average for the past seven days.
“I would say I’m cautiously optimistic,” says Colin Angus. Like everyone, I would like to believe that the worst is behind us and that we can start to get back to something resembling normal. But it’s hard to make predictions with COVID. You never know when a new variant may arise. »
Other surprises in sight
Sarah Pitt, a microbiologist at the University of Brighton, also fears the “unpredictable” nature of the virus. She agrees that it is unthinkable to keep the whole world in lockdown for indefinite periods, but says that more surprises are to be expected.
Especially since COVID-19 is highly contagious: “A person with influenza will infect another person. But a person with the Omicron variant will contaminate on average seven or eight others, ”she said this week on BBC Radio 5.
The lifting of health measures – and the obligation to isolate oneself in the event of a positive test – will create “pressure to go to work or to other events” even if one is infected, deplores the specialist.
All of this takes the UK into uncharted territory. Alarm signals are emerging especially in schools, where “we don’t have a clear picture of the situation”, explains researcher Colin Angus. Mask-wearing was eliminated last month for both students and school staff.
One thing is certain, the concerns of teachers and parents are the same as in Quebec. Doubts remain about the quality of the air. The Ministry of Education had CO readers installed2 in classes. The first solution proposed in the event of exceeding the standards is the opening of doors and windows. The teachers complain about freezing.
Unlike Quebec, which repeats that the air purifier is “not suitable for the context of schools”, the United Kingdom ended up ordering 9,000 devices equipped with HEPA filters at the end of January. The latest news is that 1,265 UK schools have made “valid requests” to receive one of these devices, the government says. The Ministry of Education claims that just 3% of premises who use a CO reader2 reported rates requiring an air purifier.
Waiting lists
The parallels between the health systems of Quebec and the United Kingdom are also striking. Despite the drop in hospitalizations due to the pandemic, the British health system is also under pressure, recalls Colin Angus.
“The number of patients with COVID-19 who are hospitalized for another reason remains high,” he said. The presence of patients with a highly contagious disease creates a logistical headache for healthcare workers. This significantly undermines efforts to reduce waiting lists for other types of diseases, such as cancer, which have been sidelined for two years. »
The British Ministry of Health estimates that 10 million patients have neglected to seek treatment since the start of the pandemic for fear of going to hospital. More than 300,000 people have also been hanging around on a waiting list for over a year. For these hundreds of thousands of people, the “COVID-19 crisis” is far from a distant memory, as evoked by the rainbow mural at Paddington station.
This report was partly financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund – The duty.