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Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 Profile picture
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Mar 15 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
THREAD: some thoughts on current covid situation in England.

Latest hospital data just came out up to 13 March - almost 1600 admissions - still increasing & 50% higher than 2 weeks ago 1/5
Going up in all regions (fastest in SW & NE) and age groups. Going by prev Omicron (BA.1), about half might be "incidental" admissions - but are clearly showing increase in community transmission.

But boosters are waning - esp older adults who are almost 6 months out. So...2/5
it's possible that more might become "primary" covid admissions but hopefully boosters will hold. We'll see what happens to NHS diagnosis data over the next few weeks. Either way, more Covid in hospitals makes care harder and affects staff absence too. NHS still *exhausted* 3/x
There have been sharp increases in children's admisisons - at the very least this is highlighting yet another surge in covid in children - the third in 7 months, worst in Jan 2022.

When are we going to stop assuming prev surges will stop kids getting infected again? 4/5
Each surge comes with more school disruption, more admissions, more long covid & more teachers & parents infected (teachers have some of highest rates of long covid).

Teen vax is low & vax of 5-11s can't came soon enough - how many waves do they need to face unprotected? 5/5
PS1 See this on vax in kids

PS2 and see this on effectiveness of masks in schools. This is such a bad time to remove all mitigations in schools.

PS3 AND don't even get me started on the danger of dropping so much surveillance. It's plain dangerous.

theguardian.com/world/2022/mar…

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Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 14
THREAD: @ArisKatzourakis wrote a brilliant @Nature commentary busting some popular - and unfortunately sticky - myths about the evolution of Covid and what this means for the pandemic.

I'll summarise its main points here but TLDR it's not over. 1/7
1. Endemic does NOT mean mild (e.g. TB, Malaria are endemic in some parts of the world). 2/7
2. Viruses do NOT evolve to be less virulent. They evolve to spread more efficiently - sometimes this means they end up more virulent (e.g. higher viral load), sometimes less. 3/7
Read 8 tweets
Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 10
I wrote about 3 linked lessons from Covid that we need to learn for the future in this editorial for @ScienceMagazine

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

1/5
1. Massive, unwieldy, intransigent systems fundamentally changed because of the need to control Covid.

Implies that most sticky problems remain unsolved cos of "won't" *not* "can't" -> we must demand honesty from govts about which solutions are considered necessary & why 2/5
2. Some sticky problems aren't even recognised as solvable! e.g. annual deaths from flu & pneumonia. These reduced massively last 2 years .

Instead of using flu as a benchmark for Covid, question the benchmark.

Instead of return to normal, ask if normal can't be better. 3/5
Read 5 tweets
Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 10
THREAD on new evidence showing (again!) that mask mandates in primary and secondary schools do reduce covid rates from the US Center for Disease Control (CDC)

(NB K-12 means kindergarten to yr 12 (17/18 yrs))

full report here: cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…

1/4
They compared schools with full, partial & no mask mandates over autumn 2021 in the state of Arkansas and also before & after in schools that switched from no masks to masks.

Using a single state means similar contexts, background infection rates, vaccination rates 2/4
They found clear evidence that full mask mandates were better than partial ones were better than no masks. Whichever way they looked at the data, they found the same effect.

On average full masks reduced transmission by 23% - a significant amount! 3/4 ImageImageImage
Read 5 tweets
Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 4
Quick THREAD on current Covid situation in UK

TLDR: cases, hospitalisations and deaths going down everywhere except Scotland where all are going up. BUT admissions going up last few days in England too.

1/8
Prevalence from ONS infection survey shows that it's falling everywhere *except* Scotland where it's going up quickly.

ALL nations are still much higher than at any point pre Omicron. 2/8 Image
Hospitalisations show exactly the same pattern with Scotland going up sharply.

While overall deaths within 28 days in UK are still falling, in Scotland they have started rising again.

Scottish cases increases have been in older adults H/T @PaulMainwood 3/8 ImageImageImageImage
Read 9 tweets
Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Mar 2
THREAD on all the reasons why I think Omicron does *not* signal the end of the pandemic

TLDR: vaccines & mitigations can hasten its end but we're not done yet & Omicron is just another milepost on the road.

So here goes: Omicron is the 4th major variant to dominate here 1/10
But variants aren't single blocks either - Delta in the UK ended up being mostly subtype AY.4 and AY.4.2 was taking over when Omicron came - and now BA.2 is taking over from BA.1.1. which took over from BA.1. 2/10
Covid evolves rapidly, but this isn't straightforward.

None of the main variants evolved *from* each other - instead so far they are all distinct, becoming gradually fitter via subvariants until replaced by an entirely new variant. 3/10

H/T
Read 10 tweets
Prof. Christina Pagel 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Feb 11
THREAD: quick overview of where we are with Covid in UK - and end of a dashboard era...

TLDR: going to move to using ONS infection survey only from now on, cases still high, trend uncertain, hospitalisations and deaths falling 1/12
firstly, vaccination isn't really happening - very low numbers of 1st, 2nd or 3rd vaccinations now 2/12
PCR tests are dropping like a stone - and this is what we used to calculate to positivity rates. So they are becoming more unreliable. And then, different nations are now changing how they are reporting nations and Scotland is stopping positivity reporting. 3/12
Read 12 tweets

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