COVID Q&A

Is the new variant deadlier and is this lockdown working?

Q Is the new mutant Covid strain really more deadly?

A Since the public were informed in December of a new variant – dubbed the Kent mutant – politicians and scientists have said there was no evidence to suggest it was more deadly. But new data shows it might be.

On Friday, the Prime Minister said: ‘In addition to spreading more quickly it also appears there is some evidence the new variant first identified in London and the South East may be associated with a higher degree of mortality. It’s largely the impact of this variant that means the NHS is under such intense pressure.’

The data comes from scientists on the New And Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, experts who advise the Government on the behaviour of the coronavirus, and is based on trends in the number of people dying from the new and old variants.

The findings appear to show that the new variant is about 30 per cent more deadly but experts warn this evidence is at a preliminary stage.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, said the evidence on how lethal the new variant is, ‘is not yet strong’.

Q Are more people dying now than during the pandemic’s peak in 2020?

A With the UK Covid death toll running at around 1,000 a day since the early part of January, it may seem as if more people are losing their lives to the virus.

But according to the Nuffield Trust, an independent healthcare think-tank, twothirds of the 80,000 excess deaths seen since Covid-19 struck between last March and January 1 occurred within the first two months of the outbreak.

It says: ‘At the height of the first wave there were more than double the expected number of deaths in a week.

‘A comparable peak did not occur in the autumn and winter, although deaths have increased at the beginning of the year following a surge in cases.’

Professor David Spiegelhalter, a statistics expert at Cambridge University, says: ‘No, more people are not dying now.

‘It may look like it because some of the figures from early in the pandemic counted deaths only among those who were tested for Covid. But if we look at actual Covid-related death registrations for that period, they are significantly higher [than they are now].’

For example, weekly registered deaths peaked in April at almost 9,500.

The highest weekly figure for January 2021 so far is 6,586.

Q Is the latest lockdown working, at least?

A It’s not easy to say with certainty, but most evidence suggests, at a national level, the lockdown is slowing the spread of infection.

The latest NHS Test and Trace figures show the daily number of positive Covid tests in England is down to 40,000 – compared with 60,000 on January 10, a fortnight ago.

Meanwhile, the R rate, which measures the rate of infection, is down to 0.8 compared with 1.3 a week ago, so for every 100 people with Covid-19, another 80 will be infected, whereas last week it would have been 130. This means that infection rates are slowing.

However, scientists at Imperial College London last week produced data suggesting that lockdown did not reduce infection rates in the first two weeks of January and that numbers, if anything, may have increased slightly.

This was based on what’s called the REACT study, which carried out swab tests on 142,900 volunteers between January 6 and 15.

It calculated that the R rate is more like 1.04 – which would mean the infection is still spreading and that London (where an estimated one in 36 people are now infected) was one of the worst-hit areas.

The Imperial team also used Facebook data to monitor population movement and found that, while most of us complied with the stay-at-home message over Christmas, mobility increased in the first two weeks of January as people returned to work – which may explain the apparent increase.

But Professor Kevin McConway, from the Open University, says there is a ‘strong possibility’ that the REACT figures are inaccurate because they look at the number of positive tests over a short period of time (in this case, under ten days).

‘They may be comparing successive days on which the number of tests taken is not large and may not be representative of the pattern across the country.

‘Even the researchers themselves urge caution in the interpretation of their data.’