Britain’s health secretary Sajid Javid foresees record cases

Britain could reach a record 100,000 new Covid cases per day, the country’s top health official acknowledged this week, even as he strongly defended the government’s plan to lift most virus restrictions on July 19.
The health secretary, Sajid Javid, said that vaccines had “severely weakened” the link between infections and hospitalizations and deaths.
About 51% of adults in Britain are fully vaccinated, according to data compiled from government sources by the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford, and despite a surge driven by the highly contagious delta variant that has pushed average new cases past 27,000 a day, hospitalizations are in the hundreds and daily deaths remain in the lower double digits.
“The vaccine has been our wall of defense — jab by jab, brick by brick, we have been building a defense against this virus,” Javid told the House of Commons on Tuesday.
Javid spoke forcefully in support of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s bold experiment to jettison most virus restrictions — including capacity limits, social-distancing rules and mask mandates — even as cases are rising steeply and the highly contagious delta variant is spreading globally.
Javid said that modeling suggested that infections could be as high as 50,000 per day, double the current rate, on July 19, or “Freedom Day,” as it has been dubbed by the British press.
After that, Britain could reach 100,000 new cases per day, Javid said, although he cautioned that virus models are less certain further into the future.
Britain reported 27,334 new cases Monday and 178,128 over the past week, an increase of 53% over the previous week.
In a speech to the House of Commons on Monday, Javid also warned that cases could rise, but said the vaccine would mitigate the worst effects of the virus.
“There is no risk-free — absolutely risk-free — way to move forward,” Javid said then. “But we do need to start returning things back towards normal and learning to live with Covid.”