“It is a reminder of what this country can achieve when we all work together,” Sajid Javid, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, told a Downing Street press conference. Intended to do away with the legal requirement for people who test positive for COVID-19 to wear masks and isolate themselves in schools and communal areas.
According to the BBC, daily infections in the UK remain high but are falling; On Wednesday, 108,069 new cases were registered in Britain.
Meanwhile, India on Wednesday recorded 3.47 lakh new Covid-19 cases and 703 deaths. The country’s Omicron tally is 9,692.
Whether or not this is a smart move to lift the ban is difficult to tell. Restrictions—whether imposed or lifted—are mostly determined by the number of cases, the risk of different types of infection, and the facts and figures of vaccination across the population.
A study published in the Lancet on January 19 said that around January 17, 2022, there were 125 million omicron transitions a day in the world, which is ten times the peak of the delta wave in April, 2021. However, the study noted that the proportion of asymptomatic or mild cases, which is around 80–90% for the omicron variant, has increased compared to previous variants, which is why the global infection-detection rate is 20% globally. has fallen to 5%.
On the case rate, the UK Health Protection Agency’s chief medical adviser, Dr Susan Hopkins, told the BBC that the rate of cases would drop substantially, but could plateau at some point. The uptake of the vaccine and the wearing of masks around strangers will determine how quickly this happens, she said.
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