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The new, more contagious strain of Covid-19, which first emerged in the south-east of England, has already spread rapidly, even during the country’s second exclusion in November, according to a report by Imperial scientists on Thursday. College London has been published.
A report by scientists from Imperial College London, released on December 31, estimated that the new coronavirus strain tripled its number of infections in England at the close of November, while the number of new cases reported by the previous variant was caused, decreased by a third.
The new strain recorded a higher reproduction rate (R) – which determines how contagious a disease is based on the number of people infected by each infected person – of 0.7 versus 0.4 for the previous strain, even with the ‘high levels of social distance’ during the pre-Christmas closing.
An R rate must be less than 1 to decrease the number of new cases. The UK Government’s latest estimate of the R rate for the UK as a whole, published on 23 December, was between 1.1 and 1.3.
The emergence of the new Covid-19 tribe forced more than 50 countries to impose travel restrictions on the United Kingdom by the end of December, many of which were lifted much later. France reported its first case of the new variant on its soil on 25 December.
“There’s a big difference in how easily the variant virus spreads,” Axel Gandy, a statistician at Imperial College London and co-author of the report, told the BBC. “This is the most serious change in the virus since the epidemic began,” he said.
Imperial College research also found that the new strain initially spread the fastest among people younger than 20 years, but it then began to spread to other age groups.
“The early data were collected during the November closure where schools were open and the activities of the adult population were restricted,” Gandy said. “We now see that the new virus is contagious in all age groups,” he continued.
The government on Wednesday reintroduced lock-in measures for areas covering 78 per cent of the English population, while regional authorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also brought back restrictive measures.
Intensive care units in London and the surrounding south-eastern region exceeded their capacity on December 29, with an occupancy rate of 114 and 113 per cent respectively, according to NHS data leaked to the specialist publication Health Health Journal. In response, the government activated one of its Nightingale hospitals – designed exclusively with Covid-19 patients and thus relieved the pressure of congested hospitals – on 31 December in London.
The Imperial College report suggests that closing schools after the Christmas holidays will help spread the virus: ‘Particular concern is whether it will be possible to maintain control over the transfer while schools reopen in January. . ‘ The government has extended the Christmas holiday to January 11, when high schools in England would plan classroom attendance. Pupils will return to English primary schools on January 4, except in the most serious hotspots for viruses, including London.
It is ‘inevitable’ that schools will have to remain closed to prevent the new Covid-19 variant from getting out of control, Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, told the Financial Times .
The number of deaths due to Covid-19 reached 981 on Wednesday, the highest daily toll since the coronavirus rose for the first time in the spring. Overall, the UK has seen more than 2.5 million confirmed cases of coronavirus, with the death toll standing at more than 74,000, the second highest in Europe after that of Italy and the sixth highest in the world.
The government will have to accelerate the deployment of vaccines if it wants to contain the new Covid-19 strain, its scientific advisory committee suggested on December 22, warning that the current vaccination rate is unlikely to significantly change the epidemiology of the virus.
The United Kingdom was the first Western country to approve both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca jabs for emergency use. Authorities have so far distributed one million vaccines, Health Secretary Matt Hancock wrote in an article tweet. The BBC had more than 940,000 people.