Covid-19 – Twice as many cases and three times as many deaths as in France but no health pass, how is the United Kingdom doing?

Two rooms, two atmospheres.

United Kingdom: around 40,000 new cases per day, 150 daily deaths on average.

France: "only" 15,000 average contaminations and 46 deaths on average over seven days, from November 14 to 20.

However, while on this side of the Channel, President Macron recently announced that not only would the health pass restrictions not be lifted but extended or even increased for those aged 60 and over, the government of Boris Johnson, without a health pass or vaccination obligation*, seems unwilling to change his strategy in the face of the epidemic.

After the lifting of all restrictions, the country is nevertheless facing what the French government would call an "uncontrollable situation" with in particular an incidence rate exceeding 400 per 100,000 inhabitants.

Britons aged 12 and over are more than 80% completely vaccinated, according to the official website coronavirus.data.gov.uk when the French are 89%. Why then does France, more vaccinated than its neighbours, seem willing to take new restrictive measures or extend existing ones?

"I never liked the idea of ​​telling people to show their papers"

Less than 1,000 patients on ventilators

Shouldn't we also see this as a new illustration of the famous Anglo-Saxon pragmatism? The country has taken note of the decorrelation of the number of contaminations and hospital indicators and no longer attaches importance to the daily publication of the number of new cases. Especially since thanks to its high vaccination rate, the country has "only" 8,000 patients in hospital, the figure observed in France. And less than 1,000 British patients are placed on respirators, compared to the more than 1,300 French people treated in critical care (resuscitation unit, intensive care unit and continuous monitoring unit), a category that is undoubtedly broader.

"The situation in the hospital is the judge of the peace of the measures to be taken", however declared the government spokesman, Gabriel Attal, also seeming to recognize the decorrelation of the indicators.

Is France, for once, taking the example of its neighbors across the Channel? Wait and see...

* The United Kingdom has recently decided to impose vaccination on caregivers, by spring 2022.