British Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks at a television press conference at 10 Downing Street on 22 February 2021 in London, England.
Leon Neal | Getty Images News | Getty Images
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had good news for the country on Monday after months of lockdown, saying an ‘unparalleled’ vaccination program means it is ‘now on a one-way road to freedom’.
The unlocking for England will come in a number of steps and will depend on data at every stage, he said. In the first step, schools in England will reopen on March 8. The latter, scheduled for 21 June, will abolish all restrictions on the mixing and reopening of sectors that are still closed, such as nightclubs.
The UK was one of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, with the fourth highest number of infections after the US, India and Brazil. To date, it has counted more than 4.1 million cases of coronavirus and 120,810 deaths due to the virus, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
It has seen a sharp increase in cases in the winter when a new, more contagious strain of the virus has emerged in the south-east of the country. It has now become the dominant strain of the virus throughout the country, and has been detected in numerous countries worldwide, along with other more virulent strains of the virus.
The vaccination response was a silver lining in the UK experience of the pandemic. It was the first country in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine, the candidate from Pfizer and BioNTech.
It has been approved and administered by the AstraZeneca University of Oxford Jab, a cheaper vaccine manufactured in the United Kingdom that can be more easily transported and stored as adversaries. As of Saturday, more than 17.5 million Britons had received their first dose of coronavirus vaccine, with more than 600,000 both doses, according to government data.
New infections fall
Data show that new infections are declining, with early studies suggesting that coronavirus vaccines also help prevent transmission of the virus, as well as prevent serious diseases.
In the last seven days, the UK has seen 77,432 new cases of coronavirus, a decrease of 16.2% from the previous weekly count. The number of deaths in the last seven days, 3,414 deaths, is also 27.4% lower than the previous count of seven days. Hospitalizations are also falling.
This is a crucial news report and will be updated soon.
—CNBC’s Holly Ellyatt contributed to this article.