COVID 'is an all-year round virus' expert warns amid summer wave

The UK is experiencing a "summer COVID wave", a UCL professor has said, warning: "If you have cold or flu symptoms, it's probably COVID."

Figures from the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) show a sharp uptick in COVID hospitalisations in England in late July, and while admissions have since started to dip, they're still the highest they have been for around six months.

While the FLiRT variants of COVID seems to be leading to milder infections and symptoms, Professor Christina Pagel, from UCL's Clinical Operational Research Unit, suggests we should still be wary.

"I think the problem is that kind of in our heads and the way governments are dealing with it," she tells Yahoo News. "They're trying to treat COVID like flu, but it just isn't. It's not a winter virus. It's an all-year-round virus."

The latest data from the UKHSA shows COVID-19 hospital admissions at 4.24 per 100,000 people, which is far lower than during the height of the pandemic.

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So, why should people still be mindful of the virus? Prof Pagel suggests the concern is now less about hospitalisations and more about people becoming unwell more frequently and having to take time off work.

"We're still seeing loads of people getting sick and we do know from the ONS infection survey last week that they're still getting long COVID. Even if it's a 1% chance every time you get an infection, that's still a lot of people that will be getting it."

While we don't have an exact figure, the ONS estimates that two million people in England and Scotland have long COVID, 1.5 million of whom say it has affected their day-to-day activities, and 381,000 saying they have been “limited a lot” by their symptoms. Middle-aged women are thought to be the most at risk.

"It just feels like we're just really dragging down our health," says Prof Pagel. "Many people used to get one or two cold a year and the flu maybe once every four or five years – now you're adding a COVID infection once a year on top of that.

"And it still makes a lot of people sick enough to not be at work for several days – potentially longer than that if you have long COVID. That's what I find quite worrying about it, it's just disruptive.

"What worries me more is that we're starting to feel as if being sick is normal, and it's not."

Prof Pagel suggests some "structural changes" may be needed to offset this problem, for example, better statutory sick pay, and reinstating a culture where people don't mix with loads of people if they have an infectious illness – COVID or otherwise.

While the spring COVID-19 booster jab campaign will have put many people in good stead for the summer, Prof Pagel is concerned by a low uptake among immunocompromised people, particularly younger ones, with only 35% of this vulnerable group taking up an offer of a booster.

This, she suggests, could be because there is "much more vaccine hesitancy now" due to "unhelpful" misinformation and disinformation online.

Asked what she thought people should be doing to mitigate the risks of a summer wave, Prof Pagel said it wouldn't be realistic to expect people to go back to wearing face masks at big events such as the Edinburgh Fringe festival, which kicked off this month.

"It's something people could do, but if you're going to a show and you want to have a drink, you're not going to be wearing masks."

Prof Pagel suggests a better approach is for people to be more selective over the events they attend, depending on what else they have coming up in their schedules.

"For me, if I have something really important coming up, like a wedding or a holiday, I'm going to be more careful in the two weeks leading up to it about where I go, because I don't want to be sick just before I go."

Government 'could still be doing more to deal with COVID'

While hospitalisation data give us some indication of what's happening in England, we don't have reliable figures for overall infections.

Prof Pagel says the closest we have, which really isn't that close, is figures produced from wastewater monitoring in Scotland, which England stopped doing in 2022 and Wales in 2023.

"A lot of countries are still doing it – Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Norway, Finland, the US. It's quite cheap and it's a really good way of tracking how much is around.

"You can't obviously tell who's infected, and you can't exactly tell how many people are infected, but you can definitely tell if there's a wave and you can also track variants – that's why it's so incredibly useful.

"And you can check for other diseases. In the US they're using it at the moment for bird flu in cows, they're looking for H5N1 in cows on farms."

Prof Pagel says she has "absolutely no idea" why this method is no longer being used in England and Wales, adding that it is "much cheaper" than the ONS infection survey, for example, or testing people.

Yahoo News has asked the UKHSA why it suspended wastewater monitoring.

What else could the government be doing more of? Prof Pagel suggests further investment in newer vaccines and anti-viral drugs.

"There is a lot of research going on outside the UK and things like nasal vaccines and vaccines that use different methods of inducing an immune response that last a lot longer. The vaccines that we have are really good at preventing severe illness but don't last long against infection."

Anti-viral drugs are another area in which the UK is lagging behind, Prof Pagel says, pointing out that Paxlovid, a drug by Pfizer used by Joe Biden after he caught COVID in July, is freely available in the US.

One clinical trial has shown the drug is 89% effective in reducing hospitalisations and deaths among patients who were not vaccinated and were at risk of severe disease.

"In the US anyone can get Paxlovid from their doctor. Here it's really restricted. Very few people are eligible, and if they are they might not know they are."

More than £550m worth of Paxlovid, have gone to waste in the UK, the Telegraph reported in January, adding that the figure was on track to rise to £1.1bn by June, as the drugs reached their expiry dates with not enough people using them.

Professor Alex Richter, of the Clinical Immunology Service at the University of Birmingham, told the paper the eligibility criteria had been “over-restrictive", and said the scale of the waste was "pretty shocking".