Omicron continues to rage almost unchecked on the island. More and more people are having to go into self-isolation – but the government isn’t budging.
Around five percent of all Britons are currently sitting at home: as the Daily Mail reports, 1.3 million people in the UK are already in self-isolation. For the population, the effects are already being clearly felt.
The situation is so dramatic that there are piles of garbage on roadsides all over England because the responsible refuse collectors no longer have enough staff available. The failures are also affecting train services – numerous connections have had to be canceled.
As in previous months, there are also bottlenecks in the food supply. Fruit and vegetables are particularly affected, with 15 percent of the sector’s workforce currently out of work. Many supermarket shelves are already empty.
In England’s hospitals, non-essential operations are already having to be postponed due to staff shortages. Here, too, 15 percent of staff are sick with Corona or in quarantine.
According to reports, the government in London was still planning to announce a change in testing rules on Wednesday. Accordingly, a positive antigen test would be enough to trigger mandatory isolation. This should shorten the quarantine period and reduce the high demand for PCR tests.
In the meantime, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has had to admit that the British health service NHS is under “considerable pressure”. Nevertheless, he refuses to tighten the Corona measures. He justifies this with the fact that the high infection numbers do not lead so far to a similarly high number of hospitalizations.
More than 218,000 new infections were reported in the U.K. on Tuesday. This figure includes some subsequent reports from the past few days.
- source: heute.at/picture: Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
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