Western Morning News (Saturday)
UK infections fall as study backs long interval doses
CORONAVIRUS infections are dropping across the UK, new data suggests, as a study found that giving doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine 12 weeks apart improves protection.
Around one in 115 people in private households in England had Covid-19 between February 6 and 12, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, down from around one in 80 people from January 31 to February 6.
Meanwhile, in Wales, around one in 125 people are estimated to have had Covid-19 between February 6 and 12, down from one in 85 previously. In Northern Ireland, the figure is around one in 105 people, down from one in 75, while in Scotland it is around one in 180 people, down from one in 150.
The data, which does not cover care homes and hospitals, is based on swab tests from thousands of people regardless of whether or not they have symptoms. It comes as new analysis from Oxford University published in The Lancet confirmed that a single dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine offers 76 per cent protection against Covid-19 from 22 days after vaccination, and that this had not waned by the three-month mark. The UK policy of leaving up to 12 weeks between doses also resulted in a higher efficacy overall, the study found.
There was 81 per cent protection when three months was left between the two doses, compared to 55 per cent for up to a six-week interval.
The Oxford team is still urging people to have two doses because they say it is not yet clear how long protection with a single dose may last.
Meanwhile, government scientists put the R – the number of people an infected person will pass coronavirus on to – at 0.6 to 0.9 for the UK, compared to 0.7 to 0.9 in the previous week. However, they warned that “prevalence of the virus remains high, so it remains vital that everyone continues to stay at home in order to keep the R value down”.
Earlier, top scientific advisers said vaccines were having an impact on the pandemic, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson prepares to publish his road map out of lockdown on Monday.
Professor Adam Finn, from the University of Bristol and a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said “everything’s moving in the right direction” when it comes to how jabs are working.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’ve now got to the point with the study we’re doing in Bristol where we can say with certainty that there is definitely an effect.
“It’s just hard to put an exact number on it at this point because... the numbers of cases coming through are still building up, the number of people who’ve been vaccinated are still going up, but it’s becoming clearer for the Pfizer vaccine, which we’ve been using for a month longer, since early December, and it’ll take slightly longer for us to get a firm handle on just how well the AstraZeneca vaccine is preventing hospitalisations too, but they’re definitely doing the job.”
Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, said the data on vaccine effectiveness and how quickly infection, deaths and hospital cases were declining was looking promising.
He said he thought the current lockdown should be lifted in stages, adding: “I am encouraged by the cautious approach being taken, an incremental approach which I think will be adopted, namely relax one thing and see what the impact is, relax again.
“And it still may well be that by the end of May, we’re in a very different country than we are today.”
Figures show a continued decline since Christmas in the number of new cases of coronavirus, although rates vary according to region.
Overall, 74,961 new cases were recorded in England in the seven days to February 14, the equivalent of 133.2 per 100,000 people. This is down sharply from a peak of 680.8 cases per 100,000 people on January 4.
Meanwhile, the number of patients in hospital in England with Covid-19 has also fallen sharply in recent weeks.
A total of 15,633 patients were in hospital as of 8am on February 18, down 54 per cent from a record 34,336 patients exactly one month earlier. But numbers at both a national and regional level are still higher than when England came out of its second lockdown on December 2.