When he announced the lifting of all health restrictions on July 19 for England, Boris Johnson did not hide a certain concern. “It is vital that we act with caution”, had asked the British Prime Minister to his population. The Delta variant was then spreading very quickly, and more than 50,000 positive cases per day were recorded, a number close to the peak of the violent third wave in January.
Three weeks later, the bet turns out to be the right one. While masks are no longer mandatory, that there is no longer a gauge to respect in concert halls, nightclubs or football stadiums, the pandemic seems to be receding. The number of positive cases has halved to an average of 26,000 over the past seven days. Hospitalizations, which had remained low but had accelerated throughout July, are also declining: there are 750 admissions per day currently, against 900 at the end of July.
Epidemiologists taken by surprise
This development has taken most epidemiologists by surprise, as well as the UK government itself. Sajid Javid, the Minister of Health, had publicly anticipated a possible peak of 100,000 positive cases per day, which would have been the highest level ever recorded for the pandemic. Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist at Imperial College London, whose models had been crucial in convincing Mr Johnson to impose the first lockdown in March 2020, even mentioned 200,000 cases per day.
Despite vaccination, which greatly limits severe forms, such a level of spread of the disease could overwhelm the health system. None of this happened. “Nobody really knows what’s going on”, acknowledged in an August 4 article in the journal Nature John Edmunds, epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
In the absence of certainties, two main explanations for this paradox have been put forward. The first comes from Euro 2020, which took place from June 11 to July 11. The football competition saw England reach the final, and every game prompted the English to come together in pubs, fan zones or just in groups at home. On the day of the final, hordes of supporters partied all day across the country – until their team was defeated – essentially without masks or social distancing. “When the Euro stopped, we saw a rapid decline in the number of contaminations”, says Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia. He wants proof that the contaminations in Scotland, where the national team had been eliminated on June 22, had started to decline three weeks earlier.
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