Back in mid May I wrote about how the BA1/BA2 Omicron waves were dissipating and how the various experts were declaring that Omicron had worked as a ‘natural vaccine’ and that covid-19 was now over.
I wrote then that covid wasn’t over and that we’d likely soon see another Covid wave appear.
A month after that post this is exactly what we’re seeing — a new Covid wave. Here’s the updated graph from the Zoe Symptom Tracker, one of the few up-to-date measures of covid in the UK that remain available to the public:
This weekend cases breached 2,000,000 for the UK; that’s around 1 in 30 infected.
Of course we’re now being told that this was entirely as expected — this isn’t consistent with statements made only a month ago. They’re also blaming the current wave on a pair of extra contagious new variants, BA4/BA5, which has complicated matters — we’re always going to see new variants, and while there is likely some increased virulence in the new variants, the main problem lies in the immune state of the (vaccinated) population.
It is worth pointing out that the low in cases at the end of may was higher than the peak of cases in 2021, and we’ve currently seen an increase in cases from this low comparable with the peak of cases seen in 2021 (and the wave is only halfway though)
The more important question at this point is how many hospitalisations and deaths will come with the BA5/BA5 variants. Currently there appears to be a significant increase in hospitalisations, albeit not to the levels seen during the BA1/BA2 waves:
Note that the current levels of hospitalisations are nevertheless higher than at this time last year. Hopefully these are mainly with covid, not of covid — however, I do worry that we might seeing an increase in conditions that are associated with covid but not serious covid disease itself (autoimmune problems related to anti-spike-protein antibodies or possibly directly due to spike protein pathogenicity) — this should become clear in the hospitalisations data, but we’ll have to wait until later in the summer to actually get visibility of this.
In the meantime, the obvious questions are:
How high will this wave get? I suspect that we’ll see a peak between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 cases (about 250,000 new cases per day), similar to the BA1 wave. This peak should arrive in early July. I still think that we should see lower hospitalisations and deaths than seen in the BA1 wave (mainly because it is now summer).
What happens afterwards? I fear that we’ll see a sustained plateau in cases at between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 cases (or about 150,000 to 200,000 cases per day) until autumn. Hopefully we’ll instead see cases drop below 100,000, but I don’t think this is the most likely scenario.
And then? We’re due the next covid wave in September/October.
In other news, the UK government is going to be restricting new covid data to once a week starting at the beginning of July — it is clear that they’d very much like covid to go away. It isn’t going away.
Only people we know still getting Covid are all fully vaxxed...
Say no more...
Do we not now think that we are seeing waves of regular HCovs which have always just waxed and waned and gone into and out of zoonotic reservoirs, usually causing mild / no symptoms, but now, for a variety of reasons (including the elephant in everyone's front room) causing some more severe (but not disastrously so) illness?
It was always deeply suspicious that Omicron seemed to branch off from a much earlier sequence of Sars-Cov-2. Should it actually be regarded as the same virus at all?
Do we have much faith in the specificity of the testing?
If we'd actively and hysterically overtested for these in any prior year might we have found the same? (But with less illness because there were no elephants around.)
Obviously, under this scenario it only actually goes away once the testing for it stops, which only happens when the fear / hysteria is dialled down - which is a decision the people have to make.
It's always been said that governments don't end pandemics, they only end when the people just say they've had enough.