As Johnson isolates, England lifts nearly all legal Covid restrictions
By Marc Santora
LONDON – As nightclubs across England threw open their doors for the first time in 16 months and people embraced on crowded dance floors into the dawn Monday (19), the nation that had imposed one of the most stringent and longest lockdowns in the world removed nearly all legal restrictions on social interactions.
But ‘Freedom Day’, as the long-desired and long-delayed milestone has been labelled in the British media, is a moment fraught with risk and no small amount of confusion.
Case numbers have continued to surge, reaching levels seen during the peak of Britain’s previous virus wave in January — although the numbers of deaths and hospitalizations have been a fraction of those in past waves.
Even as legal restrictions were lifted, hundreds of thousands of people were undergoing 10-day quarantines as part of the National Health Service’s test, trace and isolate program, many prompted by an official app that automatically ‘pings’ users who have come into close contact with someone who tested positive for the virus.
More than 500,000 people were pinged in the first week of July — approaching 1% of England’s population — and the rise in cases since is likely only to have pushed the figure higher.
Only hours before the rules were lifted, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was himself forced to go into self-isolation after his government’s health secretary tested positive.
The cascade of isolations has begun to cause staff shortages in pubs, restaurants and other workplaces. The London Underground’s Metropolitan line was closed Saturday (17) evening because so many staff members were pinged by the app.
In a video message recorded at the prime minister’s country house, Chequers, Johnson urged caution even as he said it was time to move away from government rules to a new era of personal responsibility.
“If we don’t do it now we’ve got to ask ourselves, when will we ever do it?” he said, adding that it would be a greater risk to reopen in winter, when the virus would spread more easily and health systems would be under greater pressure.
“But we’ve got to do it cautiously. We’ve got to remember that this virus is sadly still out there. Cases are rising — we can see the extreme contagiousness of the Delta variant.”
-New York Times