United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson has left the hospital after a week of treatment for COVID-19 and will go to his official country residence of Chequers in Buckinghamshire to continue his recovery, but for the country, the battle continues
Johnson was hospitalized on April 5, about ten days after he tested positive for the virus. His time in the hospital included three nights in intensive care receiving oxygen treatment as a tense nation waited for news of his condition.
News of his improvement contrasted with the latest official statistics showing Britain recorded nearly 1,000 daily COVID-19 deaths for the second consecutive day — one of the worst rates globally.
Recovery rate in the UK is 0.44percent, one of the lowest in the world. Out of 78,991 cases recorded till Sunday noon, only 344 have recovered according to data from Worldometers.
On Saturday, the UK recorded 917 new coronavirus deaths, taking total hospital deaths to 9,875.
Ministers are continuing to urge people to stay at home over the Easter weekend to curb the spread of the virus, despite warm and sunny weather across parts of the UK.
A disputed recent study from world-leading disease data analysts projected the UK would become the country worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic in Europe.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle predicted 66,000 UK deaths from COVID-19 by August but this was revised down to 37,000 later.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, Britain’s biggest charitable funder of scientific research, said the UK was likely to be “one of the worst, if not the worst affected country in Europe”.
Sir Jeremy, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), also told BBC One’s Andrew Marr programme that a second or third wave of the virus “was probably inevitable” and treatment and a vaccine was “our only true exit strategy”.
He said a vaccine could be available by autumn but it would take longer to ramp up manufacturing to the scale required to vaccinate many millions of people.
“I would hope we would get [that] done in 12 months but that is in itself an unprecedented ambition,” he said
Unlike the UK, the US which has already overtaken Italy in terms of the number of death (20,595) has a recovery of 6 percent, while China and Italy have 95percent and 21percent, respectively, with the global rate at 23percent.
The worldwide death toll is now more than 107,000, with the number of infections worldwide topping 1.7 million, including more than 396,000 recovered patients.
Earlier, Johnson had proposed Herd Immunity as Britain’s strategy for dealing with its COVID-19 outbreak while other countries closed their borders and limited public gatherings. The strategy involves allowing the disease to run rampant through the population which would hopefully create natural immunity as more people recovered.
However, Herd Immunity which meant up to 60% of the UK population would be infected, with a lot dead was withdrawn and has been blamed for the kingdom’s current crisis.
