LONDON (UK) – Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday Britain was in “a race against time” for rolling out COVID-19 vaccines. The number of deaths hit an all-time high, as hospitals fell short of oxygen. His top medical adviser said the pandemic’s worst weeks were looming.
One in 20 people in parts of London are now infected, with a new, more transmissible variant of the disease is seeping through the population, posing threats of overwhelming the National Health Service (NHS).
Johnson said on a visit to a vaccination centre in Bristol, in southwest England, “It’s a race against time because we can all see the threat that our NHS faces, the pressure it’s under, the demand in intensive care units, the pressure on ventilated beds, even the shortage of oxygen in some places.”
“This is a very perilous moment. The worst thing now for us is to allow success in rolling out a vaccine programme to breed any kind of complacency about the state of the pandemic.”
The government’s chief medical adviser Chris Whitty earlier said the situation was set to become worse.
Health minister Matt Hancock said there were now more than 32,000 COVID-19 patients in hospital, exceeding the roughly 18,000 hospitalised during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in April.
Its plan, announced on Monday, plans of delivering two million shots to around 2,700 centres a week in England by the end of January.
As per the first daily vaccination statistics, nearly 2.3 million people had got their first doses of a COVID vaccine and nearly 400,000 had received a second dose.
Johnson said, “We believe it’s achievable, we’re going throw absolutely everything at it, to get it done,” he said.
While talking about the support bubbles, Hancock said that support bubbles would be maintained, where households can “bubble” with another if they are single-person or fall in other criteria. However, rules on exercising with someone else could be restricted.
“Where we have to tighten them, we will,” Johnson said of the rules.