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None but essential businesses once again to remain shuttered. Primary and secondary schools closed from Tuesday forward for all pupils with few exceptions. The school year at every level interrupted with no expectations there can be completion this year; no exams, no passage to the next year's courses unless special dispensation and a more crowded curriculum can be arranged for the near future. But that is all in the future, when and if the pandemic is placed under firm control.

Should vaccine rollout proceed as anticipated everything will begin to coalesce into normalcy, slowly but steadily. Should the death numbers respond to the lockdown measures the possibility is that the country could move steadily out of lockdown, perhaps by mid-February in a best-case scenario. Caution for the present is imperative, urged the Prime Minister of his countrymen. In fact, the country faces what could be presented as a wartime situation when sacrifices must be made, and continue to be made to advance to salvation from a galloping disease decimating the population.

The new measures permitting companies like construction firms to remain at work may cost a depressed ten percent of economic output according to a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The British economy underwent a historic crash of close to 20 percent in the April-to-June period of 2020 as business was shuttered in the first lockdown in the first wave of the pandemic. Britain has been hit with the world's sixth-highest death toll with cases reaching new heights according to the nation's chief medical officer.

 

The health system risks being overwhelmed with the pace of the current spread of COVID within 21 days, should the contagion continue at the same rate. Even as Britain became the first country to begin inoculating its population with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, the surge in cases is being driven by the new variant of COVID-19, surprising even the experts in the warp speed with which it has spread and sickened people. Vaccination remains the glowing hope for the near future and beyond.

All of which has been vastly complicated by the new more contagious mutant variant of the coronavirus attributed to and named the U.K. variant, being joined by a more threatening variant from South Africa. What began in the United Kingdom and South Africa has not, like the original SARS-CoV-2 virus emerging in Wuhan China, been confined to its origins. It has dispatched itself with unwelcome speed in other countries, soon to discover that infiltration within their borders that no virus has ever respected.

Over 75,000 people have died from COVID-19 causes in the United Kingdom, 28 days at most from testing positive for the virus since the beginning of the pandemic. On Monday alone, a record 58,784 new cases of the coronavirus was reported.