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LONDON — At the stroke of midnight on Monday, for the first time in 17 months, the staff of the Piano Works nightclub pushed back the tables, cranked up the volume and threw open the dance floor to mark “Freedom Day,” a go-for-it gambit by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to end almost all legal requirements to maintain coronavirus social distancing measures in England.
“You could just feel it. The pent-up demand. It was like a jack-in-a-box. It just went pop! And everyone went berserk,” Tristan Moffat, operations director of the club, told The Washington Post.
“You could sing. You could dance,” activities that have been “forbidden” since March 2020, he said. “I’ve been in this business for 21 years and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was electric. It was buzzing.”
And the masks? Moffat estimated that three-quarters of the 300 clubgoers in the converted Victorian warehouse in the Farringdon neighborhood took their face coverings off.
It’s now their legal right.
Beginning Monday, almost all remaining coronavirus restrictions in England have been lifted. Scotland, Wales and Northern Island are still maintaining some measures, at least in the near term.
One person not out celebrating was Boris Johnson. The British prime minister is in quarantine after he was told Sunday that he should stay home because he was in close contact with an infected individual — none other than his health secretary.
Still, Johnson’s government is convinced that the country’s vaccine campaign will protect the population and the National Health Service (NHS), even as infections rise exponentially, propelled by the highly contagious delta variant.
The United Kingdom reported 48,161 new coronavirus cases on Sunday. In a few days, the caseload could match January’s peak — although this time, vaccine protection has meant far fewer deaths and hospitalizations.
The latest figures show that 68.3 percent of Britain’s adult population is fully vaccinated.
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On Monday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised the covid-19 alert level for Britain and advised Americans to avoid traveling there. “If you must travel to the United Kingdom, make sure you are fully vaccinated before travel,” the CDC said. “Because of the current situation in the United Kingdom, even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants.”
The British government denies that it is trying to hasten the arrival of “herd immunity” — the point where the virus has no place to go because the percentage of people vaccinated or protected by past infection breaks the chain of the contagion.
But many scientists say that this is essentially what the policy implies. Some health experts have called it a reckless experiment with consequences for the world. Others say it is reasonable.
[Boris Johnson back in coronavirus quarantine on eve of Britain’s ‘Freedom Day’]
In England, concert halls, theaters, sports arenas, nightclubs and other entertainment venues are now allowed to open with no capacity limits.
Want to get married? Or attend a funeral? Go ahead. Invite as many people as you want. The government is also urging workers to return to their offices.
Jason Alden
Bloomberg News
People eat their lunch outside near the London Stock Exchange on “Freedom Day.”
“It is right to proceed cautiously in the way that we are,” Johnson said at a Monday news conference, “but it is also right to recognize that this pandemic is far from over.”
He urged nightclubs to check people’s NHS covid passes, which provide proof of vaccination, recent testing or immunity after having recovered from the virus. And he said the passes would be required at clubs and other crowded venues starting at the end of September, when everyone over the age of 18 will have had a chance to be vaccinated.
Now, there are no more legal requirements to wear masks — although there is plenty of confusion.
The government said it “expects and recommends” that masks be worn in crowded and enclosed places, and some shops and businesses are asking customers to don the face coverings.
On public transportation, it’s a mixed bag. Riders on London’s subway system — the Tube — are told to wear masks. But riders on most of England’s trains are only being encouraged to do so.
“A reminder that today won’t feel like ‘freedom day’ for everyone,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted on Monday. Khan is in charge of Transport for London, which overseespublic transportation and taxis. “Please continue to be mindful of those around you, and the things you can do to keep our city safe.”
At Waterloo station, a major transport hub in central London, mask-wearing was compulsory or encouraged depending on where exactly a person was standing.
In the subway area of the station, masks are required. But in the train station, they are only encouraged.
In the station, signs read: “In crowded spaces, wear a face covering out of respect to others.”
That is what Pat Price, 79, was doing. She was wearing a blue mask and sitting in the train station next to her husband, Tony Price, 75, who was not wearing a mask.
Pat, who is fully vaccinated, said she always wears a mask when she’s out, adding, “The majority of people are quite happy wearing a mask.” She said she welcomed “Freedom Day.”
“They have got to open up; you can’t keep shutting it down,” she said. “I don’t think we can be mollycoddled to live in a bubble the whole time.”
Tony Price said he took off his mask to sit and read the paper. “I have had it on all morning,” he said. “I don’t like wearing a mask, but I still will … I think now it should be up to the individual. I agreed in the past when it was mandatory. But we have to look to the future and getting back to normal, and normal isn’t that.”
Jason Alden
Bloomberg News
Pedestrians walk near Bank Station in London’s financial district on “Freedom Day.”
Tony Carter, 39, a chef sitting on a bench at Waterloo station, said now that mask-wearing isn’t mandatory, it puts vulnerable people at risk.
He said he wears a mask all the time, even at work, where his restaurant’s rules state that it is mandatory only if more than four people are in the kitchen.
“It’s got to be done until we can at least get cases down,” he said of mask-wearing. “If cases can stay down, by all means take the masks off, and then it can be a proper Freedom Day. Until then, it’s not really freedom.”
Also on Monday, thousands of anti-shutdown protesters gathered outside Parliament, holding signs that said “No to vaccine passports” and “Leave our DNA alone” and “Covid is a scam.”
Megan Bullen, 25, an artist, said, “We are here today to stand for freedom.”
Asked whether it wasn’t, in fact, “Freedom Day,” she responded: “We don’t think it’s over yet. They are still mandating masks in supermarkets, people are still wearing masks, and they will try and roll out vaccines in September for the children.”
She added: “We don’t feel like it’s freedom. It’s a veil, and I think it’s only a matter of time before we go back into lockdown.”
Martin Pope
Getty Images
Protesters confront a police line and shout at the Houses of Parliament as part of a freedom protest on July 19.
The few people at the rally wearing masks, mostly reporters, were heckled and urged to uncover their faces.
England is already confronting a “pingdemic,” with more than half a million people in a single week “pinged” by the NHS mobile phone app telling them to quarantine for 10 days, because they had been in close physical contact with a person who tested positive.
More than 500,000 people were pinged last week. The number will probably increase this week, even as many people begin to delete the app from their phones.
Richard Walker, managing director of the Iceland Foods supermarket chain, told the BBC that his company has more than 1,000 people out — about 4 percent of the workforce — because they are quarantining after coronavirus exposure or isolating after a positive test. He said the company is hiring an additional 2,000 people “to give us a deeper pool of labor, because so many people are now getting pinged.”
“A number of stores have had to close, and the concern is that as this thing rises exponentially, as we have just been hearing, it could get a lot worse, a lot quicker,” he said.
For theater impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, “Freedom Day” was anything but. For weeks, Lloyd Webber has been pledging to open his new musical, the $8.2 million Cinderella, “come hell or high water.” The show had been in socially distanced previews at the Gillian Lynne Theater in London’s West End.
In a post Monday on social media, he said he was forced to close the show after a member of the cast tested positive over the weekend. He called the government’s isolation guidance a “blunt instrument.”
“Cinderella was ready to go,” he wrote. “My sadness for our cast and crew, our loyal audience and the industry I have been fighting for is impossible to put into words. Freedom Day has turned into closure day.”
The government said the app will remain active and that those who are pinged should quarantine, even those who are fully vaccinated — at least until Aug. 16, when the guidelines will change again.
Among those who fell to a ping were Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, effectively Britain’s finance minister. They said Sunday that the NHS had alerted them to immediately quarantine at home because they had been in close contact with an infected person — Health Secretary Sajid Javid.
This leaves some of the top government officials, charged with managing the pandemic, working from home via teleconference.
Certainly not the kind of freedom they had hoped for.
Pingdemic: England’s covid app sent half a million exposure notifications in a week
In this summer of covid freedom, disease experts warn: ‘The world needs a reality check’
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