UK Covid cases fall to the lowest levels in a year, but what about the future? | Coronavirus

After enduring record levels of Covid in the last six months, the UK has had the lowest number of cases in a year. But will the illness remain in the background when the country returns to a more normal life? Or is there another resurrection along the way?

Ian Sample, a scientific editor, explains how the virus is changing and why one expert thinks that infection rates “will never drop to very low numbers again in our lifetime.” explain.

Why was the case so low?

The UK has overcome two major waves of coronavirus in the last six months, caused by a highly contagious version of the Omicron variant. At the peak of winter, the actual number of infections was quite high, but official figures recorded hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases per day. The proliferation of infectious diseases has strengthened immunity to Covid, especially among vaccinated people, which in turn has helped push down cases.

But there are other forces behind the diminishing numbers.

Similar to the much older human coronavirus that causes the common cold, cases of Covid fluctuate with the seasons, with more infections in winter and less infection in summer. We are now in an era when the incident should subside naturally. Another important factor is the dramatic change in testing habits.

Since April, most people have had to pay for Covid testing. That is, far fewer infections are identified and recorded as cases. According to Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, community immunoflow and PCR tests used to detect probably half of all Covid infections, but now less than one-tenth. Is not … “Daily dashboards don’t detect as many infections as they used to,” he said.

Daily cases in the UK have decreased by 98% since the beginning of the year, according to the government’s Covid dashboard. They are currently below 5,000 daily for the first time since June last year.

In contrast, the National Bureau of Statistics, which estimates the level of infection from cotton swabs collected from random homes nationwide, has been infected in the week leading up to December 31st to almost the week ending May 21st. 875,000.

After a wave of continuous infections and a mass vaccination program in the UK, the percentage of people who have antibodies to Covid Very expensive.. In the UK, about 99% of people over the age of 25 have Covid antibodies, but even before their teens, the levels are high, and over 89% of people over the age of 8 have antibodies to the virus.

Will the number of cases decrease further in the summer?

It can fall a little more and stay low during the summer as people spend more time outdoors, but it’s not a problem to rise again before the fall.

With Covid’s rules completely relaxed, offices steadily increasing, and people gradually returning to pre-pandemic behavior, it’s quite possible that the virus will spread. And as immunity weakens from vaccinations and past infections, defense against infections will be the first line of defense to fail.

Protection against severe illness slowly diminishes, so increasing cases does not lead to high rates of hospitalization or death unless another variant intervenes.

… But Covid probably spreads differently

Over the past few weeks, scientists have noticed changes in Scottish data, with higher rates of immunochromatography in wealthy areas than in disadvantaged areas.

“It’s not yet clear if this is a long-term effect,” said Roland Kao, a professor of infectious disease dynamics at the University of Edinburgh.

It seems that the way Covid circulates has changed.

In the summer of 2020, the daily number of cases dropped to hundreds, but this summer it couldn’t be that low, Hunter said. “It won’t go down forever. Covid is definitely getting endemic. We won’t go down to very low numbers again in our lifetime.”

Although there is great uncertainty about the pandemic trajectory, the Joint Committee on Immunization and Immunization is for people over the age of 65, clinically vulnerable front-line medical and social welfare workers, and long-term care facility staff. And proposed an autumn booster program for residents.

… and it’s still evolving

The spring surge in Covid in the United Kingdom was caused by a variant of Omicron called BA.2. Its dominance in the UK is currently being challenged by two recent descendants, BA.4 and BA.5, who are driving a new wave of Covid in South Africa.

England health Security agencies declared it a “concerned mutant” last week as new data revealed that BA.4 and BA.5 had a growth advantage over BA.2.

Another offspring that raises concerns is BA.2.12.1, which spreads even faster and became the dominant variant in the United States last week. So far, there is no evidence that any of them cause more serious illness, but as the first Omicron showed in December, the danger comes from reaching more people. “It may be bad to spread the spread without reducing its severity,” says Kao, who expects more variants to come as the virus is circulating in large numbers around the world. I added that it should be.