“You still have the issues of patients presenting later because primary healthcare is difficult to access, a degree of staff exhaustion, it remains a system under a lot of stress. “It’s a fairly fragile eco-system,” Cook added. “In many settings, Covid is an inconvenience now, rather than a threat to life, but it continues to have a significant impact in healthcare” said Prof Tim Cook, a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine.Įssential infection control measures are an ongoing burden for hospitals and staff absences are piling pressure on the system even further. And the already substantial numbers affected by long Covid are continuing to grow. Hospitals, already trying to process massive surgery backlogs, are coming under immense strain due to staff absences, with 26,874 NHS staff off work for Covid-related reasons last week.Īmbulance services are being pushed to the limit, with a paramedic describing them as “on the fringe of collapse” in a recent BBC report. This week, school attendance in England fell to the lowest level since January, with nearly one in five secondary pupils absent and 8% of teachers off work. “There is a shift in what’s driving evolution.”Įach Covid wave no longer brings a shockingly high death toll, but it is still felt across the country. “It almost seems as if the rate of replacement of new variants has accelerated,” he said. The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee advised this week that infections of BA.4/BA.5 variants could occur as early as 28 days after recovery from a previous Covid-19 infection. Now, successive variants, including the latest BA.2.75 variant, nicknamed Centaurus, are being driven primarily by “immune escape” – the ability to infect people who have been vaccinated and infected, even fairly recently. The change, Openshaw said, is that in the first year of the pandemic, new waves were driven by the emergence of more transmissible variants, such as Alpha and Delta, which spread infection more easily. “They are actually becoming more frequent, with one piling in on top of the other.” “It does look as if the successive waves are getting closer together,” Prof Peter Openshaw, an immunologist at Imperial College London, said.

Others have also been taken by surprise by this pattern. “I would’ve thought it would have reached a steady state by now,” he said.

“The fact we’re having such a rapid succession of variants – we seem to be racking them up at alarming speed – is the most surprising thing and that’s changed the way the waves look.” “We’re in a different landscape now,” he said. Two years on, Kissler’s view has changed. And for many viruses, once a winter wave has passed, people remain immune for long enough to suppress infection until the following year. This was because, with limited information to go on at the time, respiratory viruses have a natural advantage in the winter when people are cooped up indoors and when our immune systems are potentially less effective. “We’d expected strong seasonal wintertime patterns where you don’t see a lot outside those winter months,” said Kissler. For many in the scientific community, this was a coin-drop moment that provided a glimpse of what lay beyond the first few months of catastrophe and crisis – and sowed the seed of expectation that Covid would become seasonal. Kissler and colleagues published a highly influential paper in April 2020 that predicted that seasonal resurgences of Covid “could occur as far into the future as 2025”. “The way that the pandemic has played out and is continuing to play out is unexpected,” said Dr Stephen Kissler, an epidemiologist at Harvard. Instead, the reverse appears to be occurring.

Many had assumed that by this point we might be at least heading towards a more regular pattern of infection with Covid in which we would endure a few tough months during the winter and forget it for the rest of the year. However, the impact of an illness on society also depends on how many people are infected and how often. Seasonal flu has been a benchmark for Covid since the earliest phase of the pandemic and in the spring a threshold was crossed and Covid became less deadly than seasonal flu for all age groups.

But with a fourth wave expected in the autumn, a fifth potentially kicking off by Christmas and experts saying that Covid may never settle into a seasonal cycle, some are questioning whether this steady grind of illness is sustainable. But a startling proportion of the UK population will be cooped up in their bedrooms having the strange experience of nursing a fever and sore throat in July as Covid infections continue to soar in the third major wave this year.įor most this will be an unpleasant inconvenience rather than a tragedy. P addling pools are out, beer gardens are brimming.

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