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New strain of Covid-19 tripled infections despite UK lockdown, report says
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Issued on: 02/01/2021 - 14:04
Ambulances are parked outside NHS Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel centre in the East End of London as a contagious new strain of Covid-19 surges, January 1, 2021. © Reuters - Simon Dawson
Text by:
Tom WHEELDON
The new, more contagious strain of Covid-19 that first emerged in the southeast of England was already spreading rapidly even during the nation’s second lockdown in November, according to a report published Thursday by scientists at Imperial College London.
A
report by scientists at Imperial College London released on December 31 estimated that the new coronavirus strain tripled its number of infections in
England during the November
lockdown while the number of new cases caused by the previous variant decreased by a third.
The new strain registered a higher reproduction (R) rate – which determines how contagious a disease is based on the number of people infected by each infected person – of 0.7 versus 0.4 for the previous strain, even with the “high levels of social distancing” during the pre-Christmas lockdown.
An R rate must be less than 1 for the number of new cases to start falling. The British government’s latest
estimate of the R rate for the UK as a whole, published on December 23, was between 1.1 and 1.3.
The emergence of the new Covid-19 strain prompted more than 50 countries to impose travel restrictions on the UK in late December, many of which were subsequently lifted. France reported its first case of the new variant on its soil on December 25.
“There is a huge difference in how easily the variant virus spreads,” Axel Gandy, a statistician at Imperial College London and a co-author of the report, told the
BBC. “This is the most serious change in the virus since the epidemic began,” he said.
The Imperial College research also found the new strain was initially spreading most rapidly among people under 20 years of age but it then started spreading to other age groups.
“The early data was collected during the time of the November lockdown where schools were open and the activities of the adult population were more restricted,” Gandy
said. “We are seeing now that the new virus has increased infectiousness across all age groups,” he continued.
The government reimposed lockdown measures on areas covering 78 percent of the English population on Wednesday while regional authorities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have also brought back confinement measures.
Intensive care units in London and the surrounding southeast region exceeded their capacity on December 29, with occupancy reaching 114 and 113 percent respectively, according to NHS data leaked to specialist publication the
Health Services Journal. In response, the government activated one of its Nightingale Hospitals – designed to deal exclusively with Covid-19 patients, thereby taking the pressure off overburdened hospitals – in London on December 31."