For Britain and Boris Johnson, 2021 starts with a new Covid challenge

Mr. Johnson faces a difficult – and politically uncertain – balancing act as he and his advisers seek to weigh the health risks against economic pain while retaining support for voters tired of pandemics. The prime minister has come under fire from those who say he did too late and those who complain that he went too far with restrictions and severely damaged the economy.

In an effort to determine a middle course, Mr. Johnson publicly backed down for weeks against calls for tougher closure measures advocated by scientific advisers, before finally deciding to adopt it as a new and more contagious variant of the virus that is rapidly sweeping across the country and hospitals spread. filled with the sick.

During his tenure in Downing Street, Johnson often waited until the last minute to make decisions about high interests and used his political instincts to sell them. This approach has borne fruit by uniting his Conservative party on Brexit and reaching a new trade agreement with the European Union.

But according to critics, it has served him poorly in dealing with the virus, which has resulted in unnecessary delays, greater disruption and public confusion. Britain, which has recorded more than 75,000 deaths due to Covid, is on track to have the worst death rate in Europe. It also suffered one of the biggest contractions in economic production. At the end of the third quarter, the economy was 8.6% smaller than a year earlier, a larger decline in production than France, Germany or Italy.

In the past year, the government of Mr. Johnson deviated from a relatively practical course of building herd immunity to a series of interventions of varying severity. There have also been other policy shifts, from the rejection of masks to their endorsement, from the restaurant meal subsidy to the ban on eating out and the increase and decrease in the number of people allowed at social gatherings.

Government officials say the pandemic strategy has been refined as the understanding of the virus has improved. Through it all, Mr. Johnson has repeatedly said that locks should be used sparingly and as a last resort, pointing to the human costs involved.

Public approval of Johnson’s handling of the crisis has increased as policy changes have intensified. Currently, 36% of Britons agree with the government’s handling of the pandemic, up from 72% in the spring, according to the YouGov poll. It is clear, however, that Britons at least overwhelmingly support restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the virus. A poll by Savanta ComRes on Tuesday showed that 79% of Britons support the closure.

The next few months will be critical for the prime minister, said Robert Hayward, a Conservative member of the House of Lords. The British government was very popular on vaccines and approved them – and aimed to deploy them faster than any other Western country.

Mr. Johnson has promised to vaccinate 13 million Britons most vulnerable to the virus by mid-February, paving the way for ending pandemic restrictions. Around the same time, the economic impact of the trade agreement he signed with the EU last month will begin to be felt in Britain.

“Judgments will be made at that stage,” he said. Hayward said. “This is when the mists clear up.”

It will be difficult for mr. Johnson to avoid blaming any shortcomings. Unlike in the US, under Britain’s centralized system of government, prime ministers are responsible for both the nationalized healthcare system and the implementation of lock-in rules in England.

A small but outspoken libertarian group of conservative legislators has called for the lifting of restrictions. Mr. Johnson, in part, sought to keep the economy as open as possible by avoiding the most draconian constraints and making £ 22 billion, equivalent to $ 30 billion, available to fund a test-and-tracking system that it fared poorly.

The dampening of the blow for mr. Johnson is the Brexit. During the 2019 election, he gained a new blue-collar Brexit support base that has so far proved loyal. “They are essentially willing to stand with Johnson regardless of his handling of specific issues,” said Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at the University of Kent. Whether it stays that way will depend on how Johnson succeeds in reviving the country’s industrial areas after Covid and Brexit.

Currently, the conservative level – or in some polls slightly ahead – of the opposition party remains. And Mr. Johnson can be a convincing politician.

“He’s an expert on charming audiences who may have been angry with him,” said Matthew Flinders, a professor at the University of Sheffield. “So, no, my point is, he’s not going to get a big hit.” And the next election is four years away.

Yet the past few weeks have been particularly turbulent. The discovery of a new variant of the virus in the south of England, which scientists say is up to 70% more transmissible, combined with the weakening of government restrictions in some places during Christmas, has led to an almost doubling of the infection rates at the end of December. Data released on Tuesday showed that by early January, one in 50 people in England had the virus.

Mr. Johnson introduced a triple system of restrictions in October in an effort to curb taxes while curbing the economy. As matters continued to increase, he ordered a four-week exclusion in England on 5 November.

According to a measure measuring the severity of the social health measures developed by the University of Oxford, the November closure was slightly less restrictive than the blockade imposed in the spring during the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak. The benchmark puts the end of November at 75 on a 100-point scale, compared to nearly 80 in March and April.

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Google unit shows that the second exclusion did not prevent people from traveling to the same extent as the first, which may have accelerated the spread of the variant.

In Google and Kent, for example, two places where the new variant took off, visits to stores were about 80% to 90% lower than their pre-pandemic norm in April, according to Google data. In November, the number of such trips was about 60 to 70% lower.

Scientists at the Imperial College London, in an online study of 31 December, said their research indicated that the closure measures applied in November were sufficient to control older variants of the coronavirus, but not the more contagious version not.

Despite the alarming trends that emerged during Christmas, warnings from scientific advisers and images of ambulances appearing outside hospitals, Mr. Johnson Sunday, appeared in a chat show and advocated that elementary school children should return to school on Monday.

On Monday, Mr. Johnson visits a hospital to celebrate that the UK is the first country to develop the new vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC and Oxford University. He indicated that more restrictions would come. By that evening, their assistants were preparing his speech to the country: there would be a new closure and schools would close.

“The weeks ahead will be the most difficult yet, but I really believe we are entering the final phase of the battle,” he said. Johnson said.