In this week’s update, Tim reveals some new research for those of you who may have had COVID in the past, and how we think this affects your risk of infection after vaccination. He also looks at the who and the where behind rising COVID cases and how the government’s refusal to update the recognised symptoms of covid might be driving this.
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hello it’s tim spector here from the zoe covered study giving you this week’s update and we’re going to start some personal information yesterday i went to saint thomas’s hospital and had my booster jab in my left arm with the fisa and in the right arm for a flu jab i thought i’d get it over all at once and see what happened and result was i had a sore arm as i did last time with the pfizer jab no worse than last time and i had a mild headache that has in the evening last night but has now disappeared and i felt nothing really from the flu jab so it’s just to point out that we’re adding the uh should have added the booster and the flu jab to the app so at least by monday everyone should be able to log both of those and it’s really important because really vital information about timing side effects what’s the optimum way to space all these things out that you’ve been giving us now we’ve got a lot to discuss today we’re going to be giving you some information about how protected you are long term if you’ve had a natural infection and you’ve been vaccinated that’s coming up later we’ll also be diving into why cases are still going up in in this country and how i believe that the government’s failure to tell people about the symptoms is one of the main drivers of that so let’s uh now get down and look deep into the data and number of new cases estimated for the zoe app is up again from last week slightly at 66 000 and most of these are still in the unvaccinated population with about a quarter coming from people who are fully vaccinated at least had two doses so far and this gives us a uk r value of 1.1 showing that things are still slightly on the increase and deaths over the last week have averaged about 1108. that’s about 158 per day but if you put that over a year that’s uh over 50 000 individuals which is far too high and that figure is slightly up from last week um long cove it is uh slightly up again around cases a day estimated and hospitalizations as we saw last week has again come down slightly which um slightly confusing but it’s down to about um 642 cases uh a day and there are about 600 and uh so about 769 people on ventilators around the country for still putting a fair bit of pressure on those intensive care units uh that we want to try and avoid now the uh the number of cases we’re seeing is uh greater than the confirmed cases but our data are in line with the other surveys such as the ons which is uh reassuring so if we dig into what the cause of this increase in in cases is and who’s getting infected in the last week or so we can see as in last week and as we’ve been predicting that this is really being driven by school-age kids uh perhaps some students and rates are really still increasing quite rapidly in this group and there have been studies independent studies showing that 1 in 20 school kids are testing positive in some surveys and i think this is just because kids are going to school without getting a test at home uh they’re going with these respiratory symptoms and infecting people before they then later test and then get sent home and you can see also from the graph that uh the the group 35 to 55 is also increasing and uh that is quite possibly because they’re the age of parents who are getting infected from their kids luckily we’re not seeing any big increases in the over 55s over 60s and because most the cases are in the young that’s probably why hospitalizations are still down at the moment and hasn’t yet broken through into those older age groups which i think is is good news so let’s look at what’s happening with covid around the uk and you can see from the graph that cases are going up in virtually all the regions except for a couple of them one is scotland and the other is northern ireland and scotland had a a rough time and got a lot of peaks before the rest of uh the country but it’s good to see that coming under control now and northern ireland similarly although our estimates are not as accurate there but particularly interesting i think is to look at what’s happening in wales uh which we saw last week we didn’t comment on rates have really been going up very fast in wales from a very low base and i think that’s the other point they really didn’t have many problems uh in the summer that the rest of the uk did but finally are starting to see quite bad problems and the it will be interesting to see the effect uh that of vaccine passports which they’ve brought in for nightclubs and evenings events there is going to have if we look at the rest of europe we would expect this to increase vaccination rates and and drive down some of these recent increases now across the rest of the country we’re starting to see more regional differences the south uh looking uh less problematic rates going up in the midlands and the north of england particularly uh worrying is the midlands that does seem to have the least capacity to deal with large amounts of emissions so we keep to keep a a close eye on that and i think looking at those rates plus also the any change in the age groups is going to give us an indication of whether we’re going to run into problems as we get into winter and flu season so now let’s have a look at symptoms as we do every week and it’s been 548 days since we’ve been trying to get the government to change their mind on this here are the current five top symptoms runny nose headache sneezing sore throat and loss of smell fever is not there persistent cough is not there and this is what the symptoms that are actually out there really looking more like an upper respiratory type of problem uh driven either by the fact of most people being vaccinated or the new variant and people ask me why do you think the government haven’t updated their symptoms list as they have in other countries i generally don’t know but i i think there are two possibilities that people have suggested one is that they’re worried about capacity uh because they think there’ll be a sudden run on tests and the government will look embarrassed if there aren’t enough tests to go around this is crazy to me because we have more testing than any other country in europe and we’re not even near our current capacity at the moment and so i think that could easily be managed with it with a education campaign the the other reason uh i think is the general belief by the government that the population aren’t uh clever enough to realize that the the actual symptoms they don’t think they understand the three classic symptoms anyway and giving them more would just confuse the public and therefore not help the situation uh i think they’re underestimating the intelligence of the british public or certainly a large majority of them and i would ask dr susan hopkins who is now the chief scientific officer of the new organization the hsa which has replaced public health england to stop dithering and make a decision on this because it’s really getting ridiculous we’ve actually estimated that the the underestimating the number of symptoms about 40 percent and 40 of people are out there spreading their germs around going to school um and keeping these rates ridiculously high compared to other countries and um we’ve got confirmation of this because we record on the zoe app you do how many of you are reporting classic symptoms or and getting tests so as well as the non-classic symptoms we’ve talked about we’ve seen that there are still um 20 of people that have all the classic symptoms that aren’t getting tested uh with the pcr that doesn’t get any official recognition etc or a lateral flow and that’s actually got much better over the last year as the tests have become more available and i think education’s got better uh but it’s still poor because when you think of that 20 that’s people using the app which are better educated uh because of the interaction with the device than probably the vast majority of the population so huge underestimates of the number of cases which again it is causing problems uh and keeping these infections going even with a reasonable level of vaccination so it’s still a major problem out there and we think i’m going to keep banging on about it until something’s done so we know that official confirmed cases are an underestimate of what’s really happening across the country although that’s probably fairly general around the world but it’s interesting in the uk that tests more than any other country in europe so one of the best ways to look again internationally is uh the number of admissions in hospitals which are better documented and see how we’re comparing that way which is an idea also that the number of severe infections and stress on the health service and if we look at the latest graphs we can see that whereas there’s good news that most of the countries we’re looking at are seeing a gradual decline in admissions uh the uk remains the highest of all the large countries in europe by a long way uh three to four fold more admissions uh than any of these other countries and uh we know that uh in the uk uh our population is only 66 percent double vaccinated and there are quite a few people with who only had single shots and we now know that that really offers very little protection against the delta variant unlike earlier variants where it was much more effective so those people really do need to get a second shot and let’s now look at the vaccination rates across other countries as well see how we’re doing we used to be leading the world in this and we’re very proud of that but if we look at this now and this is the percentage of the full population vaccinated not just adults as kids are being vaccinated now um we can see that spain portugal france denmark italy have overtaken us in vaccinations and also have lower rates of hospitalization which is a mixture again of the vaccine working but also having some sensible restrictions in place which we’ve take taken away and there are other countries that have also ahead of us in boosters so not only israel that started this off but also italy usa and france is is ahead of us there so i think um we uh our numbers and our lack of uh speed of increasing vaccination the fact that it’s it’s really plateauing off uh in the last month means that many other countries have actually put us on their red list and people only find this out when they try to travel and realize that uh the sort of propaganda the government’s been saying about how other countries are the risk and we should uh be quarantining here actually the reality is is much more the other way that uh other countries have realized that we’re the main risk because of our high levels and we know that our own uh travel restrictions and and traffic light system was finally relaxed uh this week uh which helps uh some people coming back uh into this country but about six months too late uh as you know from my various complaints but the number of countries that have uh put the uk on its red list meaning you have to quarantine there has actually grown and this data isn’t easy to find and certainly not being publicized uh by the government but uh as far as i could find just a quick check it now includes people going to belgium sweden germany finland uh estonia uh if you want to fancy again seeing the pyramids in egypt uh some diving in the maldives or sri lanka you can’t go there and you certainly still can’t go to australia or new zealand so i suspect we’re going to see more countries uh putting the uk on the red list until we get our uh rates of infection down or our vaccination rates uh up so now i want to talk about our new data on vaccination after natural infection and natural immunity your data has been invaluable in giving us this information and we know that vaccines are extremely effective but they do slowly wane over time and that’s why there’s this need for these boosters so we asked you to record whether you had an infection that was confirmed by pcr before having your full vaccination and looked at reinfection rates in those that did and those compared those those that didn’t and you can see from this table that we had a really a reasonable response which is what the trial showed of around 71 in astrazeneca and 83 protection with fisa between north and six months so up to six months if you’d had an infection but that rate went up to 90 for astra and 94 for pfizer if you’d had that previous natural immunity so in a way you you’re like you’re getting uh three vaccinations like having an extra booster so this is extremely encouraging and and this even happened even if that infection was up to a year before you had the vaccination and that really is uh really great news for many of you uh out there and just to put this into some uh perspective if um having had covid without being vaccinated only gave you about 65 percent protection against catching it again so uh it’s really this combination that it that it that is good so if some of you have suffered both some side effects of the vaccine and had covert at least you know that your risks are really very much reduced uh as far as we can see at the moment now obviously um this this is good news about some long lasting protection we don’t know exactly how long it’s going to last you need to keep giving us a data for that we don’t know that this applies to people over 65 because we had to group everyone together to get the numbers about reinfection we don’t know whether this applies to people with very specific comorbidities or disease but i think in general for those uh in in the broad groups between so 18 and 65 it is very good very good news we don’t know if infection after you’ve been vaccinated gives the same protection in theory it sounds like it probably will but we really don’t have any hard data on that and the immunology is so complex it’s very hard to be sure so this isn’t a recommendation to go and get infected if you’ve been double vaccinated as of course there are still the risks not only of the covenant and the new variant but also very real risks of long covered for both young and old people so to sum up rates are going up are going down this is because it’s driven by young people but the good news is that if you’ve had a a natural covert infection you’re going to be double protected when you get your uh your your double vaccination which uh should give a lot of your peace of mind do you remember about your symptoms these are the real symptoms of covid not the ones the government is still telling you about really important to log your boosters with us and also your flu jabs so we can start to separate out which ones should be given when and how long all these effects last this incredibly useful information you’re providing us so do stay safe do keep logging and thanks again for your amazing support and thank and like and subscribe all the channels as usual see you next week you
