As the NHS struggles with a rise in hospital patients with covid and flu, people are wondering whether 2023 will be a year of lockdowns and mask mandates.
Covid is back on the agenda as China ends its zero-covid policy, lifts its lockdowns and opens its borders, letting the virus rip through its population of 1.4bn. The UK, US and India have announced they're imposing testing requirements on arrivals from China.
But this does not appear to be a sign of a step towards tighter restrictions in the UK, where infections leapt to a six-month high after Christmas, with one in 20 people likely to have had the virus over the festive period, according to the Office for National Statistics.
READ MORE: Doctors 'ashamed' by chaotic scenes in new Royal Liverpool Hospital
Arrivals from China who test positive won't be required to isolate, according to Transport Secretary Mark Harper, who said tests were for "collecting that information for surveillance purposes". The increased transmission of Covid-19 in the world's most populous country presents new opportunities for the virus to mutate and new variants to emerge.
The emergence of new mutations is to be expected and has happened throughout the pandemic. What form a new variant could take is uncertain, but scientists already have their eyes on strains emerging elsewhere in the world. A new Covid-19 variant, described as the one "to watch out for" this year by epidemiology professor Tim Spector, accounts for more than 40% of cases in the US. Cases there have more than doubled in a week.
First detected in India, the sub-variant known as XBB.1.5 is a mutated version of Omicron, the most contagious variant, which has become the globally dominant strain since it emerged in late 2021. The cold-like symptoms are largely the same as Omicron, and, according to the NHS, can include:
- a high temperature or shivering (chills) – a high temperature means you feel hot to touch on your chest or back (you do not need to measure your temperature)
- a new, continuous cough – this means coughing a lot for more than an hour, or three or more coughing episodes in 24 hours
- a loss or change to your sense of smell or taste
- shortness of breath
- feeling tired or exhausted
- an aching body
- a headache
- a sore throat
- a blocked or runny nose
- loss of appetite
- diarrhoea
- feeling sick or being sick
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said it's seen no indication XBB.1.5 is more severe than other strains, but it is concerned by how transmissible it could be, Reuters reports. Mutations happen bit by bit, so major changes in a new variant are unlikely.
What XBB.1.5 appears to have is an ability to bind to cells while evading the body's immune defences, which makes it spread more easily, according to Professor Wendy Barclay from Imperial College London. It already accounts for roughly one in 25 covid cases in the UK, the BBC reports.
The WHO's senior epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said: "We do expect further waves of infection around the world, but that doesn't have to translate into further waves of death because our countermeasures (vaccines and treatment) continue to work."
This rings true in the UK where, despite excess deaths surpassing the five-year average, the covid death rate remains low due to 64% of people over 50 being vaccinated. Official guidance in the UK remains the same, with the NHS advising people to "try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people for 5 days" and to avoid "meeting people at higher risk from Covid-19 for 10 days" if they test positive for the virus.
With kids returning to schools after the Christmas break, the UK Health Security Agency advised people to practice familiar hygiene measures like regularly washing hands in soap and warm water for 20 seconds or with hand sanitiser, catching coughs and sneezes, as well as getting vaccinated and keeping kids home if they're unwell.
Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, urged calm, saying: "There is no reason to think that XBB.1.5 is of any more concern than other variants that come and go in the ever-changing landscape of Covid-19 mutants."
Receive newsletters with the latest news, sport and what's on updates from the Liverpool ECHO by signing up here
READ NEXT
