The year has been marked by the success of the vaccination drive – yet thousands have still died, reports The Guardian.
Omicron in UK
This time around, the government is pinning its hopes on the booster campaign to hold back a “tidal wave of Omicron”.
Although not a complete triumph, the UK’s vaccination campaign has been a success: it helped weaken the link between Covid infections and death.
However, the decision in mid-July to declare “freedom day” feels less and less like the mission-complete moment foreseen by libertarians within the Conservative party.
With more than 170,000 Covid deaths to date – including 17,000 since restrictions were lifted in July – the Guardian plots the UK’s vaccination progress against government decisions and the fatalities in 2021.
With 2022 around the corner, the one thing that we can say for sure is that a line has not yet been drawn under the Covid pandemic.
About Data notes and methodology
UK daily deaths are based on the government’s primary metric sourced from the Covid-19 data dashboard which only includes those deaths occurring within 28 days of a positive Covid test. At the time of publication the latest death count as recorded by the Office for National Statistics – which includes all deaths where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate deaths to 10 December – stood at 173,525 occurences.
Vaccination data is also sourced from the government’s Covid-19 data dashboard. The percentage figure represents the proportion of the full adult population to have received two doses of the vaccine.
The restrictions level is sourced from the University of Oxford’s coronavirus government response tracker. A stringency index score of above 75 is classed as “very high” restrictions level, above 50 “high”, above 25 “medium” and then anything below is classed as “very low”.
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Source: The Guardian
