England is likely in the grip of another Covid wave, UCL professor warns

A leading professor in England has warned that Covid is on the rise again, adding it is reasonably certain that United Kingdom has entered another wave of the pandemic.

There are very few ways to track the prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in England since the end of wastewater monitoring in March last year, the end of the Office for National Statistics COVID-19 Infection Survey in March 2023, and the gradual reduction of SARS-CoV-2 testing in hospitals since August last year, saidProfessor Christina Pagel from University College London (UCL).

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"However, all indications are that prevalence reached its lowest level this June/July since the summer of 2020," Pagel wrote inan op-ed published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on Tuesday (August 15.

"Weekly deaths with Covid on the death certificate from that period are at the lowest recorded level since the start of the pandemic," Pagel said.

Daily hospital admissions increasing

Since the beginning of July, daily hospital admissions due to Covid havemore than doubled as on August 4 compared to a month earlier, according to the professor.

She added that the number of patients in hospitals primarily due to the virus also doubled at that time. "

Secondary indicators such as the Zoe Symptom Tracker app and Google Trends of searches for Covidsymptoms have also been increasing since early July. So it is reasonably certain that we have entered another COVID-19 wave," she said in the article.

The professor pointed out that variants currently increasing in the United Kingdom are still the XBB Omicron substrains "and on their own, there is no reason to think they will cause a large wave."

Almost all people under the age of 50 have not had a vaccine dose for 18 months, and most under the age of 75 have not been inoculated for a year.

"Protection from previous infection will also be waning in the absence of a large wave for several months," Pagel said, adding it is likely that this wave is hitting a more susceptible population than the last few.

"Given protection from vaccines and past infection, it is unlikely that this wave will cause a large surge in hospital admissions or deaths," she said but highlighted that any increase in hospital burden is bad news.

The two major concerns

Professor Pagel mentioned two major concerns regarding the current situation. First- a repeat of last winter’s unprecedented National Health Service (NHS) crisis of Covid, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus hit all around the same time.

And second, another Omicron-like event where a new variant emerges, very different from previous strains.

"Given few, if any, mitigations worldwide and much lower surveillance, such a variant could spread a long way before we realised it was a problem," Pagel added.

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