THE third Covid wave has already peaked, experts said yesterday — as Boris Johnson revealed: “We’re in the final furlong.”
Infections have been on the rise due to the more contagious Delta/Indian variant, but hospital admissions and deaths are very low thanks to vaccines.
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Yesterday, the PM fuelled hopes that restrictions will end on July 19 so life can “get back to what it was”.
He said: “Double jabs will be a liberator. I know people are impatient for us to open up faster. Of course, I want to do that. We’re now in the final furlong, I really believe. We have to look very carefully at the data.
“At the moment we’re seeing a big increase in cases, but that is not translating into a big increase in serious illness and death.”
He said it is becoming clearer the jabs rollout has broken the link between infection and death.
The PM said: “It gives us the scope, we think, on the 19th to go ahead — cautiously, irreversibly, to go ahead.” He added there may be some “extra precautions” to curb infections — believed to include continuing to wearface masks on public transport and in some indoor venues.
However, he said: “I will be setting out in the next few days what Step 4 will look like.
“We’ll be wanting to go back to a world that is as close to the status quo as possible.” Yesterday, 27,989 new cases were reported in the UK.
In the past week there have been 146,360 — a 72 per cent increase in seven days.
But only 22 deaths were recorded yesterday, making 114 over the past week — a ten per cent increase.
An extra 259 patients were admitted to hospital yesterday, with 1,735 over the past week — an 11 per cent rise.
Kings College London says most people in hospital or killed by the virus have not been vaccinated, and Covid symptoms in the UK are now “more like a bad cold”.
Prof Tim Spector said: “We may have reached the peak of Covid infections in the North West and West Midlands, where the Delta variant got an early hold.”
