A health expert said there was a “widespread perception” that there would be a growing COVID wave in the summer that could be linked to the 2024 European Football Championship.
The latest government figures, released last Thursday, show that England has seen a 33.5 percent weekly increase in coronavirus cases amid fears of a summer surge.
Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said on Monday the findings pointed to a seasonal increase and suggested it could be linked to EM.
He told the Science Media Centre: “Monitoring of COVID cases in the UK is far less intensive than it used to be. This makes it difficult to track the rise and fall of waves of infection, assess the severity of the different variants or determine how effective the vaccines are against them.”
“Nevertheless, there is a widespread impression of a growing summer wave in 2024, similar to what we saw in 2021 when – perhaps coincidentally – a European football championship was also held, and there is evidence that this contributed significantly to the spread of the infection.”
Recently, a new group of coronavirus variants called FLiRT has emerged, and in May the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said it was “normal for viruses to mutate and change”.
Anyway, here’s what we know – and what we don’t – about the current COVID situation in England.
What we know
First of all, we know that the number of recorded COVID cases is increasing. According to the latest data from the UKHSA, there were 2,815 cases in the week ending 19 June, 707 more than in the previous seven-day period – a 33.5% increase.
However, this is a low baseline. As the charts below show, case numbers and hospitalizations were significantly higher during certain periods of the past year, such as last fall and winter.
We also know that the number of COVID-related deaths recorded on death certificates increased slightly: 146 in the week ending June 14, seven or five percent more than in the previous seven-day period.
And we know the cases are due to a group of COVID variants collectively known as FLiRT. FLiRT is on the rise in the US and now in the UK.
One of the FLiRT variants, KP.3, is “probably now dominant, having overtaken KP.2,” said Professor Francois Balloux, chair of computational and systems biology at University College London.
Prof. Balloux added: “They all cause the same symptoms” and ultimately, “the current COVID situation is not particularly worrying given the emergence of FLiRT.”
Prof Woolhouse said: “The waves continue to be driven by a combination of new variants and partly waning immunity to infection. The first signs of this were already in 2020, when a small number of people became infected with COVID for the second time, but it has since developed into a global pattern.”
He predicted that in the coming decades we will “enter a situation where most people will be exposed to COVID at a young age – possibly even multiple times.”
However, he said this would lead to a build-up of immunity, making people much less susceptible to the disease as they age. “Basically, COVID-19 will be just another cold,” he said. “But we’re not there yet.”
What we don’t know
We do not know how many cases FLiRT will cause over the course of the summer and whether there will be a significant difference from last summer.
We also do not know how the situation is currently developing in hospitals. The latest UKHSA data on hospital admissions only goes up to 29 May, when 1,567 people were admitted in seven days, 151 or 8.8% fewer than in the previous seven days.
