A top English professor has warned that COVID is on the rise again and that the UK has likely entered another phase of the pandemic. According to Professor Christina Pagel of University College London (UCL), 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.
“However, all indications are that prevalence reached its lowest level this June/July since the summer of 2020,” Pagel wrote in an 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 due to Covid have more than doubled since the beginning of July
According to the professor, daily hospital admissions due to COVID have more than doubled since the beginning of July, as of August 4, compared to a month earlier. She also stated that the number of patients admitted to hospitals as a result of the virus had more than doubled at the time. Since early July, secondary signs such as the Zoe Symptom Tracker app and Google Trends search for COVID symptoms have been growing. So it’s reasonable to assume that we’ve entered another COVID-19 wave,” she wrote in the study. The professor pointed out that the variants that are currently increasing in the United Kingdom are still XBB Omicron substrains, “and there is no reason to think they will cause a large wave on their own.”
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 infections will also be waning in the absence of a large wave for several months,” Pagel said, adding that it is likely that this wave is hitting a more susceptible population than the last few. “Given protection from vaccines and past infections, 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.
Professor Pagel raised two key concerns about the current state of affairs. For starters, a repetition of last winter’s exceptional National Health Service (NHS) crisis of COVID, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus hit all at once. Second, another Omicron-like event occurs in which a new strain forms that is quite distinct from earlier strains. “With few, if any, mitigations in place around the world and much lower surveillance, such a variant could spread a long way before we realized it was a problem,” Pagel noted.