Record-Breaking Omicron Is Now So Bad in U.K. Even the Queen Has Canceled Christmas

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson may think it’s entirely okay to throw a Christmas party in the middle of an unprecedented surge in coronavirus cases—but Queen Elizabeth II isn’t going to take the same risk.

On Thursday, a day after Britain recording its highest ever number of new COVID-19 cases driven by the mega-infectious Omicron variant, the Queen announced that she was cancelling her traditional pre-Christmas lunch for the extended Royal Family that was due to take place next week.

The Queen’s decision came the morning after Johnson and his top medical advisers levelled with Brits at a Wednesday press conference. The nation, they warned, is going to be breaking pandemic records every day for weeks, and there’s no reason to believe at this stage that the Omicron variant is less severe than any of the mutations that appeared before it.

‘Dropping Like Flies’: Omicron Brings Fresh COVID Hell to Cornell

The numbers, which are almost certain to be repeated in the U.S. and around the world in the coming weeks, are extremely grim.

Medical experts warned lawmakers on Thursday that, for Omicron, the R value in Britain is between 3 and 5, meaning the variant’s spread is doubling in size every two days. If that remains unabated, by Christmas Day 640,000 Omicron infections would be being recorded. At that rate, the entire population would have been infected by early in the new year.

That worst-case scenario is not going to happen, though. The rate of growth will inevitably slow as the virus struggles to find people who are susceptible to the virus, and Britain is better placed than the U.S. in terms of people with booster doses. They appear to offer strong protection against infection, and even better protection against hospitalization, and death.

But experts are clear that there are extremely difficult weeks ahead.