UK sees sharp drop in Covid-19 cases following lockdown

UK Covid-19 cases fall nearly 80% in 6 weeks of lockdown Covid-19 cases in England have fallen 78% since the government imposed a national lockdown on Jan. 4, according to weekly statistics from the National Health Service Test and Trace. By Eoin McSweeney, Hannah Strange and Jessie Yeung, CNN CNN

Covid-19 cases in England have fallen 78% since the government imposed a national lockdown on Jan. 4, according to weekly statistics from the National Health Service Test and Trace.

Some 84,310 people tested positive for the virus between Feb. 11 and Feb. 17, the lowest weekly figure recorded since September. 

That’s out of a total of out of a total of 2,580,210 people who were tested that week, a 14% decrease from the previous week.

Thursday’s figure was a large decrease from the 388,037 recorded between New Year’s Eve and Jan. 6, the week UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed harsh measures to curb the spread of a more transmissible variant of Covid-19 first discovered in southeast England.

Johnson set out a four-step roadmap on Monday to take England out of its Covid-19 lockdown, declaring that the nation was on a "one-way road to freedom."

The UK has the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe, with more than 120,000 fatalities, and remains under strict pandemic restrictions.

It has administered nearly 19 million first vaccine doses, with 642,788 fully vaccinated, according to data from John Hopkins University.

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