COVID-19 (Page 37)

Varavin88/Shutterstock Back in the summer of 2021, the UK government’s pandemic modellers predicted that there would be a significant COVID outbreak in the autumn. Yet so far, this hasn’t happened. Other countries with good COVID vaccine coverage have also seen their cases fall and then stabilise. So is herd immunity finally arriving? Reaching a level of immunity across the population that’s sufficient to stop the virus spreading has been a goal since the beginning of the pandemic. Initially it was hoped natural exposure to the virus would get us there. Yet data from Brazil, India and Iran (some of which is in preprint, and so still needs to be formally reviewed) suggests that herd immunity through natural infection wasn’t achievedContinue Reading

Subbotina Anna/Shutterstock Although COVID infections are currently low or in decline in most western countries aside from the UK, there’s still a long way to go before the threat of the pandemic is over. A big concern this winter is if there’s a resurgence of COVID with other respiratory illnesses coming back strongly alongside it – particularly influenza. In both the southern and northern hemispheres, influenza infections rapidly declined and largely disappeared soon into pandemic. Social distancing measures used to contain COVID were even more effective in reducing the spread of influenza. But unfortunately, this means we now need to be braced for flu to be especially bad this year. In some ways, immune responses to COVID and influenza areContinue Reading

Firefighters conducting disinfection at the Terminal 3 of Wuhan Tianhe International Airport. Xinhua / Alamy Stock Photo Since the start of the pandemic, several countries have adopted a zero-COVID strategy, aiming to eradicate COVID within their borders. Faced with the highly transmissible delta variant, many are now abandoning it. New Zealand is the latest country to abandon the zero-COVID approach, following hard on the heels of Vietnam and Australia. Vietnam was once hailed as a zero-COVID success, but it has recently experienced a sharp rise in deaths. Despite a population of 97 million, Vietnam managed to keep cases below 3,000 until May 2021, when the delta variant started to spread internationally. By October, it had 800,000 cases, and COVID deathsContinue Reading

THE UK economy returned to growth in August after suffering a dip in July. According to the latest official figures, UK gross domestic product grew 0.4% in August in the first full month after Covid-19 restrictions were lifted. The UK economy resumed its recovery in August It remains 0.8% below February 2020 levels, before the pandemic began. The economy resumed its recovery after suffering a 0.1% drop in July. The Office for National Statistics previously estimated growth of 0.1% for July, but that has since been revised down. However, other recent data revisions for earlier in the year make the economy much closer to its pre-pandemic size than when the last set of monthly GDP data was released. Darren Morgan,Continue Reading

In April 2020, I wrote about North Korea’s efforts to protect itself from COVID-19. The regime was genuinely afraid about the spread of the disease because it knew the country’s healthcare system wouldn’t cope if the virus took hold. Initially there was acceptance that, for the most part, North Korea hadn’t witnessed an outbreak as severe as those seen everywhere else. Whether that’s still the case is hard to say. There’s a serious lack of data on the country, and the authenticity of North Korea’s claims to have had zero cases has long been questioned in the west. But even if true, the effects of the pandemic are being felt in other ways. North Korea closed its borders early inContinue Reading

shutterstock Eric Crudup/Shutterstock It is a little-known fact that humans have not one but two immune systems. The first, the biophysical immune system – the one we’ve all heard much about – responds to infections as they enter the body, detecting and eliminating intruders such as the coronavirus. The second is the behavioural immune system, which adapts our behaviour to preemptively avoid potentially infectious people, places and things. The behavioural immune system is the first line of defence against infectious disease. It prompts people to socially conform with known traditions and to avoid foreign, dissimilar and potentially infectious groups. In a recently published study, my colleagues and I at the University of Cambridge examined the impact of the behavioural immuneContinue Reading

COVID restrictions in England were lifted on July 19, and although COVID cases are currently soaring in schoolchildren and their parents’ age group, many feel that the worst of the pandemic is now over. Thanks to the tremendous effectiveness of COVID vaccines, further lockdowns seem unlikely. However, a look at recent mortality data reveals that everything is not yet back to normal. Since the start of July, almost 13,000 more deaths have been registered in England and Wales than the average for the same period in 2015-19. The week ending September 24 saw 1,420 excess deaths. These numbers are small compared with the darkest days of the first wave when excess deaths in the two nations exceeded 11,000 a week,Continue Reading