England Covid risk ‘lower than Europe’

ENGLAND’S population of people susceptible to Covid is one of the lowest in Europe, analysis from Sage scientists has found.

Modellers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) sought to determine how many people in different European countries were at risk of hospitalisation or death from Covid.

To do this, they ran a hypothetical model in which every single person was exposed to coronavirus at the same time.

Figures were available for 19 nations and this allowed for comparable analysis which factored in vaccination level and infection rates.

In this theoretical situation, which was done pre-omicron, the academics found England had around 73,000 people at risk of hospitalisation, and roughly 15,000 at risk of dying – equivalent to 130 hospitalisations and 27 deaths per 100,000 people.

Only Hungary, at 106, had a smaller proportion of people at risk of hospitalisation, and just one country – Denmark with 24 per 100,000 – had a smaller ratio of people vulnerable to death.

For hospitalisations, Romania had the most at-risk people owing to low vaccination rates, and France (149 per 100,000), Germany (322) and Italy (163) all had a larger proportion than England.

With deaths, England’s 27 per 100,000 compared favourably to that of other wealthy countries.

Germany, with 65 per 100,000, had more than twice as big a slice of its population at risk of dying.

The study was done before the omicron variant emerged and was published on the website medRxiv and reviewed by Sage scientists on Nov 24.

Dr Lloyd Chapman, an expert in infectious disease modelling at LSHTM, said that omicron’s ability to evade prior immunity meant the figures of vulnerable people may now be higher, but the relative positions of the countries were still valid.

“We used data on deaths over time to estimate the level of prior exposure to Covid-19, allowing us to account for the impact of undetected infections on the remaining risk of hospitalisations and deaths,” Dr Chapman and colleagues told The Sunday Telegraph.

“Our findings suggest there is still a high potential burden of hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19 in all 19 countries despite reasonably high vaccine coverage, since the absolute number of people who have not been vaccinated or exposed to the virus remains high.

“However, there is a lot of variation between countries, with estimated maximum remaining hospitalisations at this moment in time ranging from 100 per 100,000 people in Hungary to 1,100 per 100,000 people in Romania.

“The data suggest that countries with lower vaccine coverage among the elderly have the highest potential remaining hospitalisation and death burdens.

“The analysis does not account for waning of immunity, potential new variants emerging or the booster rollout, so cannot be used to predict the effect of restrictions being lifted or when the pandemic will end.”

The research was presented to experts at SPI-M, the Sage sub-group advising the Government on the spread of coronavirus.