Covid cases in Scotland have spiked by almost a third in the past week with the highly infectious New York variant on the rise.
Public health expert Professor Linda Bauld has called for an extension of the vaccination programme to all over-50s.
In the past week, there were 15,541 confirmed cases in Scotland – about 2200 cases per day – up 30.5 per cent on the previous week.
The most recent Office for National Statistics figures showed about one in 30 Scots with the virus – more than 182,000.
There have also been rises in the numbers of people in hospital and in intensive care.
The most recent figures show there were 696 new hospital admissions and an average of 867 people in hospital with Covid in the last week.
There were also 20 new admissions to intensive care.
With the Scottish Government’s decision to end asymptomatic testing at the end of April there are no exact numbers but Bauld, Professor of Public Health at Edinburgh University, said we are “certainly in the middle of a spike”.
She said: “The case numbers are not a terribly good indication of what’s happening at the moment because it depends on who takes a test.
"The ONS infection rate is a better indicator.”
Bauld said there had been a rise in cases since May but it was still too early to say if we were experiencing a fourth wave.
She said, however, the increased hospital admissions was not necessarily an indicator the virus was becoming more serious, suggesting it was more likely people going into hospital for other matters were being tested and discovering they were infected.
She added: “The data shows these sub-lineages are a bit more transmissable but there is not any evidence they cause more serious disease.”
But she said: “If we see these hospital numbers continue to go up over a more sustained period, my colleagues will become more concerned.”
Bauld said there was “no money tree” to allow for the continuation of asymptomatic testing but added: “We would all value wider availability of testing if it was more affordable.
“We are waiting to see what will happen for the vaccine programme. There was very good uptake of spring boosters but I
would like to see the JCVI extending boosters to more groups.”
Professor Rowland Kao, chair of veterinary epidemiology and data science at Edinburgh University, said: “It seems to be increasing more in Scotland than in England and Wales. Why, we don’t know.
“Our residual immunity here may be different.
“Broadly speaking, we probably did slightly better vaccination-wise – in that we got boosters out more quickly – and ironically that could mean we have less residual immunity now.”
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