Notably though, most new infections are now reinfections. New admissions to hospital in England have been rising since early September. Perhaps of even more relevance than infection rates is the likely impact infections will have on health services this autumn and winter. Also, we don’t know whether a new variant might appear in the coming weeks that could drive up infections even further, particularly if it’s more transmissible or better at evading our immune defences. Past modelled estimates of future infection trends have often been wide of the mark. It’s likely that these factors, along with waning immunity, will drive up new COVID infections for a few weeks to come.īut for how long and how high infection rates will climb is difficult to predict with any accuracy. While we don’t fully understand all the reasons for this, contributing factors may include falling temperatures, reduced sunlight, and people being indoors more. Many respiratory infections such as influenza, RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) and the other human coronaviruses cause more infections in the autumn and winter months. Read more: COVID: how ICUs in England were stretched to cope with the pandemic What next? Hopefully the fourth dose will provide somewhat longer-lasting protection against infection, but it’s too early to know for sure. Fortunately protection against severe disease is more durable. We also know that protection against infection or reinfection following COVID vaccination or indeed an infection may not last long. We know that for most highly transmissible endemic infections the incidence of infection is largely driven by the rate at which immunity is lost in the population.
#That escalated quickly meme driver#
A recent ONS analysis found travelling abroad was one of the strongest risk factors for testing positive.īut probably the main driver behind this current wave is waning immunity. One possibility could be people returning from overseas holidays. Schools started back during the first week in September, and while this may now be contributing to the new wave, infections started increasing too early for schools to be the primary driver. So the current wave isn’t being driven by a new variant. By far the most common variant in the UK remains BA.5, which fuelled the wave of infections in June and July. There are two relatively new variants under investigation in the UK, BA.2.75 and BA.4.6, but neither represent more than a few per cent of infections. Previous major COVID waves in the UK have been driven by the emergence of new variants, such as alpha, delta, and most recently, a string of omicron subvariants. This wave of infections is different, however. The ZOE COVID study app broadly agrees with this timeline. We are now into the next big wave of COVID infections in England, and probably elsewhere in the UK.
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