With new variants likely and an NHS already in crisis, there is no room for complacency about decreasing hospital admissions in England
Last week saw the first week-on-week fall in Covid hospitalisations in England since May. At the peak, in mid-July, an average of about 1,900 people were admitted to hospital with Covid each day in England. This is similar to the 2,100 admissions a day for the previous surge that topped out at the end of March, and the roughly 2,000 a day for the wave at the turn of the year.
The immunity acquired through high levels of infection in the previous two waves has proved insufficient to significantly reduce the burden of ill-health in this cycle: a reminder, if one were needed, that it makes no sense to get infected in order to prevent future infection.
Kit Yates is director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death
