End of the isolation of positive cases, paid tests … how England will “live with the virus” – archyde

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Have you tested positive in England? From Thursday, you will no longer be required to self-isolate. And from April 1, tests will no longer be free (except for the elderly or vulnerable), while children will no longer be instructed to be tested twice a week at school. These are the key measures of the plan to “live with the virus”present by Boris Johnson this Monday.

“We should be proud that the United Kingdom has put in place the largest screening program of any major country in the world”, justified the British Prime Minister during his speech to parliamentarians. “It is time to rely on the sense of responsibility towards each other,” he added. Since the end of January, the mask is no longer compulsory in closed public places in England.

Omicron wave in very sharp decline

The context is considered appropriate, by the leaders across the Channel, to go further. On the one hand, this epidemic wave carried by the Omicron variant is in very marked decline. Fewer than 50,000 positive cases are now reported each day in the UK and around 40,000 of them in England. The number of hospitalized Covid patients has fallen below the 1,000 threshold, and only 300 of them are on artificial ventilation (the equivalent, in a way, of resuscitation in France). We are very far from the peak reached a year ago, with 35,000 Covid patients in hospital and nearly 4,000 of them on artificial ventilation, while contamination has soared to a largely unprecedented level.

The other element put forward concerns the very high vaccination coverage. More than 90% of English people aged at least 12 have received at least a first dose, and two out of three have a complete vaccination schedule with a booster. It is time “to see our country really get back on its feet” and activity must resume “in a normal way”, justified Boris Johnson, Sunday, at the microphone of the BBC.

Fragile people “deliberately abandoned”?

Still, some scientists consider it a little hasty to relax the measures at this point. “England has a much more pronounced level of epidemic decline than that in Denmark or France. But maintaining the five-day isolation for positive cases for a few more weeks would seem wiser to me, ”judges epidemiologist Antoine Flahault.

The fears mainly concern immunocompromised and fragile people. Gemma Peters, chief executive of Blood Cancer UK, said the government had “deliberately abandoned them”. “The fear is not so much that of an epidemic resurgence, which is always possible, but rather of putting immunocompromised and unvaccinated people in great danger with risk factors”, abounds Antoine Flahault. Boris Johnson also insisted that the population should remain vigilant, because the Covid “remains a dangerous disease” for these vulnerable people.