Covid is evolving rapidly and the UK needs to keep measures in place in case restrictions are needed against according to the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. Sir Patrick was speaking to the Science and Technology Committee this morning following a steep rise in Covid cases.
He said: “This virus has not gone away. It’s not going to go away. It’s going to be a circulating human virus for as long as we can see forward. And it hasn’t stopped evolving. It’s been quite an unstable period, so the virus is changing very rapidly, and it’s got quite a lot of space to evolve into.
“It’s not a foregone conclusion that evolution to increase growth and transmission — which is what the virus does, wants to do — necessarily is associated with reduced severity.”
Sir Patrick said we need to keep monitoring how the virus evolves, we need to keep protecting the vulnerable and he said we need to be “able operationally to ramp things up again if you need to — [this] is crucially important.” He added: “That in a sense, is also a lesson from the very beginning of the pandemic where the underfunding of Public Health England for many years had caused a diminution in capacity.”
He added: “I expect to see further hospitalizations because of the lag time and further deaths with this. So, that is the consequence of the high levels of infection rates. We should also be aware that there may well be long term problems with Covid infection — long Covid is still being studied. It's not a sort of a completely stable situation and it's not a risk-free situation to run very high levels of infection.”
Covid cases have risen by a million in a week in the UK and test results have shown that about one in every 16 people had the disease last week. Infections were up in England and Wales, and Scotland reached a new high. But in Northern Ireland, there was a decrease.
Yesterday, the number of new Covid cases recorded across the UK stood at 81,280 — a little lower than the seven-day-average figure of 115,470.
During the Science and Technology Committee meeting, it was noted that Monday this week saw more than 19,000 patients presently hospitalised with an infection of SARS-CoV-2. Numbers in hospital have increased every day since March 5 this year.
A previous version of this article reported 90,000 people were in hospital with Covid in the UK. In fact, 19,000 people were in hospital. We are happy to clarify this.
