A lot of doom-mongers thought that opening up the economy on July 19th would be a disaster. So far this has not been the case. Both hospitalisations and deaths are going down following a slight rise early on. Hospitalisations for Covid are now below 1000 per day now compared to nearly 5000 per day back in January of this year.
Compare Britain’s figures to a US state like Florida. Currently there are 1.5% of Floridians afflicted with Covid who are dying with over 70 Covid cases for 100k people. This is a much worse situation than in the UK where although there are a lot of positive tests (275 per 100k) the Infection Fatality Rate (0.8 per 100k) is far far lower than in Florida. The Florida situation is worsened when compared to the UK as Florida has a population of only 21 million when compared to the UK’s 68 million. Even though the UK has a higher population than Florida this one state seems to be coming off far worse than the whole of the UK with regards to covid deaths.
It certainly seems to be the vaccinations that are behind the big drop in deaths and hospitalisations in the UK. In the UK 88.7% of Britons have had at least one covid vaccine dose whereas in Florida only 58.4% have been vaccinated. This lower level of vaccination for Floridians does put them at more risk of contracting Covid and becoming more ill from it.
Both Florida and the UK are to all intents and purposes back open with regards to the economy. Granted that Florida opened up much earlier than the UK and this may have assisted the spread of Covid, but we can plainly see when comparing the State of Florida with the United Kingdom that a higher level of vaccination is resulting in a lower number of deaths. I understand that the medical authorities in Florida are doing great things to persuade Floridians to get vaccinated but they are still behind where they should be with regards vaccination rates and it shows in the number of people dying from Covid.
In Britain those who thought that opening up on the 19th July would cause a rise in deaths appear to have been proven wrong. Yes people are still dying of covid, but to nothing like the extent that they were before. Whilst there is a lot that the UK government can be criticised for about how they’ve handled Covid, we can plainly see that the UK vaccination programme has been a great success. Britain is likely to come out of the covid woods much earlier than some nations and some US states and that will mean that economic recovery might be able to come sooner as well.
