People should limit their interactions to the most essential ones and brace for COVID-19 rates to continue to surge, according to England’s top medical officer.
There will probably be an “incredibly fast” upswing before new coronavirus cases start to plateau and recede, Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, said at a parliamentary committee hearing Thursday.
Those comments follow his warning a day earlier that the “phenomenal pace” at which the new omicron variant is spreading across the U.K. will trigger a surge in hospital admissions over the holiday period. The stark assessment came as the U.K. reported a record number of new cases.
The rise in infections raises further questions about the government’s efforts to slow the variant’s spread and whether the National Health Service can withstand the pressure. The U.K. is pushing ahead with a mass booster vaccination program, coupled with a work-from-home recommendation for those who can, an indoor mask requirement and COVID passes to enter some venues.
Scientists globally are racing to determine how transmissible, virulent and evasive omicron is as the variant advances.
The new mutation infects around 70 times faster than delta and the original COVID strain, though the severity of illness is likely to be much lower, according to a University of Hong Kong study. The research adds weight to the early observations from some physicians that infections have so far been mostly mild and haven’t required hospitalization.
Even if the disease turns out to be milder, it’s possible the number of people hospitalized in the U.K. will exceed prior peaks, Witty said Thursday.
Initial U.K. data last week showed vaccine boosters improve protection to as much as 75% against omicron, but that the basic course of shots from AstraZeneca Plc and the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE partnership provided much lower defenses against symptomatic infection compared with the delta strain.
