New data shows the UK has been hit twice by the virus as Covid and cold cases rise.
According to the ZOE Health Study, the number of Covid cases has increased by 70 percent in 10 days, and the number of colds has more than doubled.
This increase is thought to be due to cold weather forcing people to work together indoors and children mingling in schools since the New Year.
And in the case of Covid, the infection is further fueled by a new highly contagious sub-variant called Kraken or XBB.1.5.
This has risen from 2% at the start of the year to 14.5% of Covid cases in the UK as of 25 January, according to the latest figures from the GISAID global virus database.
And it has likely grown significantly since then as the Swiss University of Basel predicts it will become the dominant sub-variety in the UK by the end of the month.
But while the rise in cases is sharp – and expected to continue for at least the next two weeks – scientists warn that the number of infections is still well below recent highs.
As of Friday, there were 81,666 cases with Covid symptoms in the UK daily, up from about 130,000 cases at the end of December, 225,000 last summer and a record 300,000, according to data from the ZOE app.
Meanwhile, the number of colds is still about half what it was at Christmas, with one in 413 people in the UK, or 0.24% of the population, now having a cold or the flu every day. .
The ZOE study does not distinguish between the common cold and the flu, but data from the Office for National Statistics show that flu cases have dropped by about 85 percent since the start of the year, suggesting that they are only a small part of flu cases. Current total cold and flu cases. Even during the Christmas season, there were significantly more colds than flu cases, according to the ZOE.
“Covid cases are on the rise and cold cases seem to reflect that,” Tim Spector, a professor at King’s College London who runs the ZOE app, told me. I.
“XXB.1.5 is the driving force behind Covid – that’s what we’re looking at. It is not yet dominant, but it looks like it is growing.
“But weakening immunity, cold weather and factors we don’t yet understand also play a role. There are also natural phenomena – when it’s really high, people are a little more careful, it goes down, people relax again, and these things peak and fall. So it behaves like many other viruses,” he said.
But while Prof Spector expects the number of Covid cases to continue to rise, he does not see infections rise to last year’s highs.
Instead, he believes the current wave will peak at the same levels as the Christmas wave, when daily infections rose to around 130,000, though he admits it’s difficult to predict these things with any degree of certainty.
“It’s a natural cycle. It doesn’t always stay high and it doesn’t always stay low. The virus changes. We get new variants that are a little more contagious and can hit our immune system a little more. And you may have had an infection months ago. But this is leaves, and the group of vulnerable people begins to grow again,” said Professor Spector.
“Very often we see how children drive the wave of business. The kids started climbing about two weeks ago after falling a lot. Most of the waves we have seen over the past two years have always been the first to go down and the first to go up. But we don’t quite get it, we’re still catching up on what viruses actually do.”
Scientists believe the recent rise in the common cold is due to some of the same factors as the rise in Covid cases, such as cold weather and the end of the Christmas holidays.
Meanwhile, the decrease in exposure to viruses in general during the pandemic, as people tried to avoid Covid, is thought to have also made some people more susceptible to colds.
“At this point, you are much more likely to catch a cold than Covid,” Prof Spector said.
Steve Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds, said: “I’m guessing a lot of this has to do with people going back to school and working and changing,” adding: “Colds are not commonplace or trivial for some.”
Professor Danny Altmann of Imperial College London said: “We had a short, hard flu peak, but it’s over. Since then, we have observed an unusually persistent symptomatic coryza.
Source: I News
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