Great Britain exploded over the last week with a 53% climb in new daily COVID-19 cases (based on a 7-day average). From Wednesday, Dec. 15 to Saturday, Dec. 18, there were almost 347,000 new cases—or almost 87,000/day. With a population of 67 million, this is equivalent to over 430,000/day for the U.S., or over 1.7 million/day for India! (The U.S. never hit over 300,000 nor India over 425,000.) While Omicron cases are going wild, they are still a minority of the new cases—estimated to be about 10% of Friday’s new cases on Dec. 17. There are now over 7,600 COVID-19 patients hospitalized, about 20% of them in London alone. The Mayor Sadiq Khan reported that this was an increase of 30% in one week, and that the “vast majority” of them were unvaccinated. On Dec. 18, Germany put the U.K. on its highest COVID-19 priority list, now requiring that visitors from the U.K. undergo a two-week quarantine.
On BBC today, Khan said that new restrictions were “inevitable” and that “sooner rather than later” was necessary, lest “public services like the NHS” (National Health Service) may collapse. He invoked the “major incident” category for London on Dec. 18, where special arrangements for their emergency services are created.
