BRITISH DIRECTIVE to change today to stay local.
LONDON — Britain is taking another small step out of lockdown as it looks nervously at a new virus surge inundating its European neighbors.
With U.K. coronavirus vaccination rates outstripping those of European Union nations, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is easing the stark “stay at home” message that has curtailed everyday life — and kept the virus in check — for almost three months.
Starting today, it will be replaced in England with a message to stay local. People will be allowed to meet in groups of six outdoors and can resume outdoor sports such as basketball, tennis and golf.
The other parts of the U.K. — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — are taking broadly similar steps. In Wales, thousands of people poured onto beaches and mountain spots Saturday, after the authorities lifted travel restrictions that have been in place since December.
Most nonessential businesses remain closed, along with pubs, restaurants, gyms, cinemas, theaters, museums and sports stadiums. Millions of workers have been furloughed, with the government paying the bulk of their wages.
The U.K. has recorded more than 126,000 covid-19 deaths, the highest toll in Europe.
Stephen Powis, medical director of the National Health Service in England, urged people to continue to follow the rules and limit contact with others, saying the easing “does not mean job done.”
“We’ve made enormous progress that we need to build on and not squander the gains we’ve made,” he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.
Like the U.K., French President Emmanuel Macron’s administration has been hoping to outrace the resurgent outbreak with a vaccination campaign, an ambition that appears increasingly unrealistic as hospitals struggle, physicians said.
Critical-care doctors in Paris warned that surging coronavirus infections could soon overwhelm their ability to care for the sick in the French capital’s hospitals, possibly forcing them to choose which patients they have the resources to save.
The sobering warnings were delivered Sunday in newspaper opinions signed by dozens of Paris-region doctors. They came as Macron has been vigorously defending his decision not to completely lockdown France again as he did last year. Since January, Macron’s government has instead imposed a nationwide overnight curfew and followed that with a grab-bag of other restrictions.
But with infections soaring and hospitals increasingly running short of intensive-care beds, doctors have been stepping up the pressure for a full French lockdown.
Writing in Le Journal du Dimanche, 41 Paris-region hospital doctors predicted that softer new restrictions imposed this month on Paris and some other regions won’t quickly bring the resurgent epidemic under control. They warned that hospital resources won’t be able to keep pace with needs, forcing them to practice “catastrophe medicine” in the coming weeks as cases peak.
“We already know that our capacity to offer care will be overwhelmed,” they wrote. “We will be obliged to triage patients in order to save as many lives as possible. This triage will concern all patients, with and without covid, in particular for adult patients’ access to critical care.”
Macron remains adamant that not locking France down again this year, even as more than 2,000 deaths per week push the country ever closer to the milestone of 100,000 people lost to the pandemic. The country now counts more than 94,600 virus-related deaths.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, the government acknowledged Saturday that the country’s true death toll from the coronavirus pandemic now stands above 321,000, almost 60% more than the official test-confirmed number of 201,429.
Mexico does little testing, and because hospitals were overwhelmed, many Mexicans died at home without getting a test. The only way to get a clear picture is to review “excess deaths” and review death certificates. Excess deaths are determined by comparing the deaths in a given year to those that would be expected based on data from previous years.
On Saturday, the government quietly published such a report, which found there were 294,287 deaths linked to covid-19 from the start of the pandemic through Feb. 14. Since Feb. 15 there have been an additional 26,772 test-confirmed deaths.
The higher toll would rival that of Brazil, which currently has the world’s second-highest number of deaths after
“We’ve made enormous progress that we need to build on and not squander the gains we’ve made.”
— Stephen Powis, medical director of the National Health Service in England
the United States. But Mexico’s population of 126 million is far smaller than either of those countries.
The new report also confirms just how deadly Mexico’s second wave in January was. As of the end of December, excess death estimates suggested a total of about 220,000 deaths related to covid-19 in Mexico. That number jumped by around 75,000 in just a month and a half.