The U.K. are now leaps ahead of any other country with vaccinations
Well it depends how you look at it. The UK is one of the countries in the lower range of percentage of people fully vaccinated in Europe because they use all available vaccines for giving as many people one shot. The rest of Europe adheres to the guideline that the vaccine needs two shots with a few weeks in between.
Time will tell which strategy works best of course:
www.euronews.com/2021/03/08/covid-19-vaccinations-in-europe-which-countries-are-leading-the-wayEither strategy will help to get rid of this virus, at least stopping it from disrupting society
Even with gigs happening there will be travel restrictions or even bans. As kong as one stay in one’s own country more things are possible but concerts require international travel for cree and artists, so that will be disrupted for a while I guess.
There's no intent to express any nationalism here - as whilst clearly the UK fortunately made the right call to order vaccines much earlier in the hope that they would be effective, we screwed up on most of everything else with poor planning historically, constant dithering & poor decision making...
(so *every* country, apart from perhaps New Zealand, has very significant lessons to learn from the failures & successes)
...but, just to point out, you're not comparing like with like there at all in terms of the percentages of people having had two doses.
Well, as you note, firstly the UK's taking a different approach when it comes to the 2nd dose - however, since we have far greater supplies then, along with having more people with some protection, this is simply a temporary abnormality in the data - where, in 12 weeks time there 'should' be over 22 million (roughly a third of the population) having had both doses... ...& very significant numbers more having had the first...
...where, including the elderly, for whom vaccines are typically less effective, the real life data is showing 73-89% protection after 35 days from the first dose; depending on the type given.
***Note the WHO efficacy target for any Covid vaccination was only 70% at the outset - so a single dose is clearly exceeding that.***
(so, atm, being in my late 40s then the 'invitation' for my first dose is predicted to be in mid-late April - however it 'may' be sooner if things carry on the way they are)
However you're also missing that the EU countries who appear to be doing best pecentage-wise all have relatively small populations...
...where, with the exception of Poland with ~38 million people, until you hit Germany then no country has more than 12 million people - & most have far fewer... i mean Malta, at number 2, has <0.44 million inhabitants.
Now, along with actually having vaccines to give to people, this is important in terms of the logistics necessary to vaccinate en masse - since it's relatively easy to vaccinate, say, every worker in a hospital & every old person in a home... ...or focus on a very limited number of population centres... ...but to get it out to everyone needs far more in place in terms of distribution & places to get vaccinated & people trained to administer it & whatnot.
Hence the UK sensibly needs to be compared to countries with not wholly dissimilar populations - so particularly France & italy which are within 10-11%; albeit on the low side...
(Germany & Russia have the 2 larger populations, but the former is somewhere over 23% higher than the UK... ...whilst Russia has both well over twice the population & is dissimilar in many other ways).
[NB i'm certainly not suggesting that France, italy, Germany or any other country couldn't ramp things up - but without having the supplies to do so then it's difficult to get everything in place & iron out any issues.]
Moving on from that though, it's all about the level of risk that governments are then willing to take before opening things back up; esp with higher risk things like gigs -
- be that in terms of say, randomly opening everything up (which seems to be the case with some US states), only prioritising the clinically vulnerable, needing most people to have some protection (possibly with vaccination passports to do more risky things) or vaccinating everyone.
So, whilst i've been really appalled with lots of the stuff that the UK government's done historically over this - the current 'roadmap' is reasonably sensible...
(though, since we have universal health coverage & so there's no financial disincentive to having the vaccine, i personally see no reason not to need a vaccine passport, with very limited exemptions for people who cannot medically have the thing, before allowing people to undertake higher risk activities in order to help protect everyone else at, say, a gig or in a pub or whatever - as, along with efforts to ensure that, for example, people without English as a first language understand the science, there's always going to be some people who will believe nonsense from FB & Twitter & the like; & there's no reason why they should be allowed to put everyone else at greater risk)
...& so whilst i wouldn't be completely surprised if it slipped by a week or two, unless things are never going to be opened up again & without anything catastrophic happening, it's certainly not unreasonable that large gigs with full capacities will be sensible for the beginning of July at the latest over here...
...esp since the virus is less transmissible in the summer months.
Where the biggest unknowns appear to be though is what will happen this coming winter - as, along with the potential for new variants of Covid to emerge & gain prevalence which 'could' mean that everyone has to be revaccinated...
...the current thinking is that we're going to have a horrendous winter in terms of other airborne viruses - since there's far lower immunity as a result of the lockdowns, social distancing & mask wearing over the current one.
However, along with not directly affecting gigs over most of the summer here, beyond good or bad luck then it significantly depends on what extent people will keep things like mask wearing & handwashing up.
So, from my side, significantly before this was news here over the last couple of days, i've looked at the fact that, whilst i'd normally be laid up for a few days a couple of times a year with flu like symptoms, i've had nothing for well over a year now - so, at least in the winter months & points where all the students come back to Sheffield, the minor inconvenience of continuing to wearing a mask in shops & taking advantage of the free hand-sanitiser & whatnot is well worth is to me ongoing...
...but naturally i can't speak for what anyone else will choose to do - & so what effect that might have on the need for any restrictions to be reimposed.
As an additional half-thought - as i've not seen any specific rationale for the KOL gig being postponed - would it be reasonable to assume that Duran's audience would be notably older than, say, a festival or the KOL gig?
Simply that, with the efficacy of a single dose of the vaccines rising over 35 days, delaying shows with a typically younger audience would mean that all of them who are going to take it would have the best protection (prior to several weeks after a second dose)...
...whereas, for a significantly 40+ audience for a Duran show, a first vaccination by April-May at the latest would have the same effect.
Yeah, it's just a thought.