How are you feeling? There has been a vibe in BBC HQ that friends, colleagues and family have been having a grottier year than usual – shaking off one cold only to rapidly catch another, rolling from infection to infection. “The reality is we're lacking data and so we have got a lot of anecdote,” says Prof Jonathan Ball, from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. So what could be going on? We are in a summer wave of Covid so if you have a cough or fever then the virus is a possible culprit.
We do not collect the same detailed data as during the peak of the pandemic, but the wave started to build around May . “I know so many people who have recently had Covid,” says Prof Peter Openshaw, from Imperial College London. Around 3,000 people in hospital are now testing positive for Covid - around twice the figure for early April.
The infection isn't necessarily the reason they have been admitted, but it is one way of gauging whether we are in a wave. “There is a very significant rise, Covid hasn’t yet turned into a winter virus we can be very confident in saying that," says Prof Openshaw. This seems to be driven by the FLiRT variants of the virus and pubs rammed with football fans may have given the virus a helping hand too.
The virus is still capable of causing an unpleasant infection and while we are no longer taking emergency measures to keep it in check, we are giving two doses of vaccine a year to the most vulnerable because of the threat it can pose. You would e.
