A sustained fall in new COVID-19 cases in the UK is being cautiously welcomed by scientists, although there is no consensus on what is behind it — or whether the current wave of infections has peaked.
The UK on Monday recorded 24,950 new cases, down for a sixth day and well below the 39,950 from a week earlier. Scientists pointed to the end of the soccer European Championship, a period of sunny weather and the start of the school holidays as potential factors, alongside the vaccine rollout.
The data is a boost for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has been fending off criticism over his decision to lift restrictions at the same time that the highly transmissible Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 was taking hold.
Photo: Reuters
Given that there is still uncertainty over whether the trend would continue, the government is not yet celebrating, with Johnson’s spokesman telling reporters on Monday that he “doesn’t think we are out of the woods yet.”
“We have to be very careful,” British Minister of State for Crime and Policing Kit Malthouse said on Sky News yesterday. “We’re waiting to see what happens over the next few days.”
The final stage of lifting curbs in England on July 19 saw nightclubs reopen, festivals back with unlimited crowds and the end of mandatory mask-wearing. The government warned the infection data does not yet account for that.
“It will not be until about next Friday before the data includes the impact of this change,” Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, told the BBC.
Still, the figures are “looking good for at least the summer,” he said.
The improvement was unexpected. Last month, British Secretary of State for Health Sajid Javid warned infection rates could rocket to 100,000 new cases per day.
However, he said it was right to go ahead with reopening, because vaccinations had “severely weakened” the link between infection and hospitalizations and deaths.
“The recent fall in cases in England is great news, but also puzzling given that progressive relaxation of restrictions has occurred, with the final release of all measures last week,” said Stephen Griffin, associate professor at the University of Leeds School of Medicine.
Potential factors include “a great many people” choosing to self-isolate in recent weeks after coming into contact with a case, he said, and the large number of students being sent home due to a confirmed case in their class “bubbles.”
Many schools also began the summer holidays last week.
“We have also had weather that would promote more outdoor and less indoor mixing, which again might curb spread,” Griffin said.
Still, it is still “very much a waiting game” to see how these factors “interact over the summer and translate to new infections,” he said.
Another theory is that soccer’s European Championship drove a short-lived COVID-19 surge in the UK. Crowds not only packed into Wembley stadium, but in town squares across the nation, and in pubs and homes as the England team reached the final.
Case numbers in Scotland started falling earlier than in England, prompting suggestions this was down to that team’s early exit from the contest.
The decline in cases in Scotland now looks like a “longer-term trend,” said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.
He told the BBC there was no sign of cases picking up since the tournament ended.
There are “multiple factors at play” in the drop in cases, said Adam Finn, a professor of paediatrics at Bristol University, including “infection-induced immunity, vaccine-induced immunity and, critically, behavior.”
Nine in 10 people across the UK are now likely to have COVID-19 antibodies, according to the Office for National Statistics, either because they have had the virus in the past or been vaccinated against it.
Just more than 70 percent of UK adults have had the two vaccine doses needed for maximum protection, and 88 percent have had one.
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