Worst point – but UK vaccination total tops 2.4m
“We are now at the worst point of the epidemic in the UK,” warned Professor Chris Witty this morning during a flurry of media appearances designed to hammer home the severity of the coronavirus situation to the public.
England’s Chief Medical Officer said that hospital staff-to-patient ratios could deteriorate to unacceptable levels unless the virus is brought under control and that the pandemic was “everybody’s problem.” The Prime Minister also painted a grim picture, saying that the NHS is in a “perilous situation”.
The latest warnings come as seven mass vaccination centres open their doors today. The sites, in Bristol, Epsom, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham and Stevenage will be open 12 hours a day. Boris Johnson has promised a further 50 regional vaccine sites by the end of the month. Hundreds more GP-led and hospital services will also begin operating later this week.
Some 2.4m jabs have been administered across the UK. Around 2m people have been vaccinated (meaning that some have received two doses), including 40 per cent of those over 80. The government’s aim is to vaccinate 15 million by the middle of next month.
In a speech today, Sir Keir Starmer accused the Prime Minister of “incompetence, dithering and delay”, and suggested that tighter restrictions could be needed.
Can this really be the right approach? The Labour leader’s call to go further seems to be more a symptom of the need to differentiate himself from Johnson than a practicable solution to rising hospitalisations.
The government has very few levers left to pull and has twigged that improving compliance might be more effective than toughening up the rules even further. The lag between becoming infected and being admitted to hospital also means that any police crackdown would be a response to the public’s behaviour two weeks’ ago, over the Christmas period, rather than now.
Professor Whitty said that the situation could start to ease in several weeks’ time as the vaccination rollout begins to have an effect. Data from the ZOE Covid tracker app suggests that infections in London have already fallen by over 20% in less than a week, however. Across the UK, infections also seem to have peaked with the change in daily cases on a downward trajectory since the two weeks up to 4 January.
Worryingly, though, the app’s data also shows that the rate of symptomatic cases in the over-60s is still rising, helping to explain the pressure on hospital wards; nearly double the number of Covid patients are now in hospitals compared to the previous peak in April.
No mulligan for Trump
Democrats have prepared an article of impeachment against Donald Trump before the House of Representatives. The article accuses the President of “incitement of insurrection” which led to the storming of the Capitol last week.
A vote on the article will go ahead on Wednesday unless Vice-President Mike Pence invokes the 25th Amendment, a mechanism that would allow for Trump to be removed from office without recourse to impeachment.
Despite Mike Pence’s rift with the President, he is thought to oppose invoking the 25th. If Pence declines and the House votes by a simple majority to impeach then a trial would begin in the Senate where a two-thirds majority would be needed to remove the President from office.
A senate trial may be delayed by several months, however, so that Biden’s inauguration isn’t overshadowed. Crucially, even if Trump has already left office, a vote to impeach would prevent him from running again. But as was the case during his previous impeachment in December 2019, the prospect of conviction is slim because of Trump’s continued Republican support in the Senate.
Trump has made no public statements since he was banned from several social media platforms, including Twitter, on Friday.
As if things couldn’t get any worse for the President, organisers of the PGA golf tour have said they will move the event away from the Trump-owned course in Bedminster, New Jersey this year as the association would be “detrimental” to the PGA brand.
The Terminator
Arnold Schwartzenneger didn’t sugar-coat it: “President Trump is a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever,” said the former governor of California in a scathing video condemning the violence, in which he compared the Capitol riots to Kristallnacht. He then initiated humour mode: “The good thing is that he’ll soon be as irrelevant as an old tweet.”
Whenever I watch Arnie, I can’t help thinking of The Simpsons character, Rainier Wolfcastle, a Schwarzenegger-inspired muscle machine who stars as McBain in a franchise of high-octane shoot-em-ups that weave their way into the early series.
The writers use Wolfcastle to poke fun at Hollywood excess and the McBain films riff on the tropes of the Maverick Cop popcorn flick. You can watch the full masterpiece here, a slice of vintage Simpsons gold.
Mattie Brignal,
News Editor