England Covid update: everything trending down (which is good) but data disappearing after March (which is sad).
Covid summary
The latest Covid news in England is good news. Hospital admissions with Covid have been falling steadily over the past few weeks, with a sizeable 25% fall in the most recent week.
This fall is seen across all English regions and also in number of people in hospital recorded by NHS Trusts as being primarily because of Covid. The Covid variant JN.1 is still dominant in England, with nothing new of concern just yet as far as I can see.
The most recent data from the ONS Winter Infection survey goes up to 4 February 2025 and also shows falls - expect these to continue in the next release in a week’s time. Note that UKHSA have also taken their modelling a step further and now produce estimates of new infections each day (incidence) rather than just percentage of people infected at any one time (prevalence), which includes people both at the end and beginning of their illness and so measures slightly different things at the beginning and end of a wave .
Flu update
Flu admissions are also falling steeply now, relieving pressure on the NHS. This is good news, since January 2024 was not a good month for NHS emergency services.
Loss of data after winter
The ONS Winter infection survey ends in March this year, the clue being in the name. We thus lose our best source of infection data for at least another 6 months (assuming that ONS is funded to do it again next year - I hope they are, and perhaps could add Flu and RSV rapid tests in too!). To compound this, NHS England have just announced that their weekly Covid hospital admissions data will be monthly from April this year.
The UKHSA publish weekly surveillance reports over the winter, including admission rates for influenza and Covid via SARI watch, but these are fortnightly over the spring and summer. This means that for the summer we will simply not have any very timely information on the levels on Covid infection in the community - at best we will know if there was a wave (or not) a few weeks ago.
Covid might be edging towards becoming a winter bug, but it is not there yet. In 2023, we saw a late big wave in March and then cases start to increase by the end of August with another peak in October, before a large December wave. While people can be reasonably sure of not catching either RSV or Flu outside of the winter months, the same is simply not (yet?) true of Covid. For the clinically extremely vulnerable in paticular, this hole in our knowledge of Covid prevalence will matter. In my ideal world, I’d continue the ONS infection survey (in its current form) at least until Covid settles into a more predictable pattern, or we have next generation vaccines available that can protect better against infection.
Great analysis from Prof. Pagel as usual.
The key part is the warn on gutting our monitoring rots,
Strong agree the NHS England reporting should remain weekly.
Also agree there is a HIGH likelihood of Spring or Summer covid resurgence, covid continues to also have strong affinity for spreading in roasting areas like the Sahel or South East Asia, I would be even more pessimistic that it will become a 'winter only thing' in the near future.
So ONS 'Winter' survey should be ALL YEAR round until covid stabilises and or we get more used to combatting it.
I remain concerned that many deaths and hospitalisations which are really due to covid are being mis categorised as not covid
So while the TREND line in the excellent / vital ONS prevalence rpt above is likely very accurate, the ACTUAL NUMBER of covid cases reported by ONS and particular numbers reported by the NHS at any one time are likely a LOT higher in reality, as is long covid ( The punch from the latter, long covid, takes a lot longer to become obvious to people affected , in many cases a few years delay before the affect of hidden body damage from previous infections manifests itself )
Thank you again for keeping us informed. I think it’s such a mistake to take away funding for monitoring this virus. I just wish leaders would take public health seriously and look to make public spaces, schools etc safe ventilated spaces. Sadly it’s not going to happen!