One Person in 50 in England Now Has Covid, Government Says

(Bloomberg) --

One person in every 50 now has coronavirus in England, the British government said, as medics raced to vaccinate millions of people against the disease.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said 23% of all over-80s in England have now been given a dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, meaning some of the most vulnerable patients are getting the protection they need.

More than 1 million people in the country are infected while in London one in 30 people are infected.

Johnson underlined his promise to vaccinate almost 14 million people at the highest risk and their carers by mid-February. He said 1.3 million people across the U.K. had already received a shot.

The prime minister was speaking at a news conference in London a day after he put the country into its third national lockdown since the pandemic began.

“You all want to be sure that we in government are now using every second of this lockdown to put that invisible shield around the elderly and the vulnerable in the form of vaccination, and so to begin to bring this crisis to an end,” Johnson said. “Yes it is a huge effort. It’s the biggest vaccination program in the history of this country.”

The national lockdown threatens to push the U.K. economy into a double dip recession and the government tried to help businesses with another package of emergency support worth more than 4.6 billion pounds ($6 billion).

But Johnson says he had no choice but to order the country to stay at home, and pointed to latest infection figures showing record levels of coronavirus in the population.

“The number of patients in hospitals in England is now 40% higher than at the first peak in April,” he said. “When everybody looks at the position people understand overwhelmingly that we have no choice.”

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