With all lockdown measures set to come to an end in Britain on June 21, warnings have been issued that the United Kingdom may be experiencing the start of the COVID-19 third wave.
A scientific adviser to the Boris Johnson government has been reported as saying by the BBC that the B.1.617.2 variant of coronavirus, which first emerged in India, had caused “exponential growth” in the country even though new cases are relatively low at the moment.
Professor Ravi Gupta is associated with the University of Cambridge and he is also on the UK government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag).
Gupta has suggested the Johnson government that the UK should delay ending COVID-19 restrictions as planned on June 21.
The BBC reported Environment Secretary George Eustice as saying that the lockdown easing, scheduled for June 21, could face delay.
To put things in perspective, the UK has recorded over 3,000 daily cases for the past five days. It was on April 12 that the UK had last reported these many daily COVID-19 cases.
As per Gupta, around 75 per cent of the new cases are of the variant that emerged in India.
“Of course the numbers of cases are relatively low at the moment – all waves start with low numbers of cases that grumble in the background and then become explosive, so the key here is that what we are seeing here is the signs of an early wave,” he told the BBC Radio 4.
Gupta said since vaccination had covered a large amount of the population in the UK, the emergence of the third wave might take longer than the previous ones.
He suggested that more intelligence needed to be gathered before unlocking could begin.
“At the moment, we don’t have enough data. There are some parts of the country where there’s literally no B.1.617.2 and everything is pretty stable; in other parts of the country it is beginning to overtake the B.1.1.7 variant – the Kent variant,” Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi told the BBC separately.
Another expert, Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, too concurred with Professor Gupta that the third wave may have begun in the UK.
“We can already see that the current measures are not stopping cases rising rapidly in many parts of the country. This looks very much as if we are now early in a third wave. Unless there is a miracle, opening up further in June is a huge risk. The rise in cases we are seeing now should cause a reassessment of the most recent relaxation,” the Guardian quoted McKee as saying.
“If things go as I think they are going to go, we will likely end up with a third wave. It will be a big wave of infections and there will be deaths and severe illness,” Gupta said, as per the Guardian.
