Wales is seeing a "resurgence" of Covid cases in communities which could be particularly dangerous for those with waning immunity who have not had their spring booster, the country's top doctor has warned. Dr Frank Atherton, the Chief Medical Officer for Wales, said the BA.5 variant of Omicron has overtaken BA.2 - which caused infection levels to reach an all-time high earlier in the year - as the most dominant strain. Scientists say BA.5 is around six times more infectious than the original Wuhan strain.
According to the latest weekly Covid infection survey from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), an estimated one in 20 people in Wales had the virus between June 24 and June 30 - up on the one in 30 reported the week before and way up on the one in 75 at the start of June. It means just shy of 150,000 people in Wales had the virus last week.
Read more: Visiting suspended at Swansea and Neath Port Talbot hospitals as Covid cases surge
Hospital admissions for Covid have also risen sharply in Wales since May. On July 7, 965 patients were in hospital beds testing positive for the virus, whereas in May this was around 400. It is predicted that this will peak at around 1,200-1,300 in the coming weeks, which are similar levels to January.
One of the biggest concerns at present is the high sickness absence rate among health and social care staff in Wales. Currently more than 7% of NHS workers are not in work, with a third of them related to Covid. In the Welsh Ambulance Service that figure is at 11.6%. Meanwhile A&E attendances are well above the average for this time of year, which is putting huge pressure on the acute end of the system.
Dr Atherton said that while it is "hard to look into the crystal ball", he predicted that by late July and into August infection rates could start to fall again. He added that there was "no appetite" for further legal restrictions to be put in place and stressed it was now about people taking personal responsibility for their actions.
He said vaccines remain one of our most important defences against the virus, and has urged anyone eligible for the spring booster to get it by the end of this month. He added that anyone with the most common three symptoms, such as a high temperature, continuous cough, or loss of taste or smell, should get themselves a free lateral flow test and isolate should it return positive.
Here is the full Q&A with Dr Atherton, who spoke to the press on Friday afternoon.
Q. How concerned should we be about this recent rise in Covid cases?
We are watching the situation very carefully at the moment. What we've seen in the recent weeks is a resurgence of cases in our community. If we look at the ONS statistics, we've gone from one in 80 of us to one in 45 of us to one in 30 of us, and just this week to one in 20 of us who have coronavirus in any given week. And that figure relates to the end of June, so it could well have grown even a little bit since then.
So there are really quite high levels of community transmission still occurring in Wales, and that has a number of implications in terms of what's happening in our hospitals. We are seeing an week-on-week increase in utilisation in the number of hospital beds with patients with coronavirus.
But what it's not doing is translating into the more serious forms of harm. People are still, unfortunately, in a small number of cases ending up being treated in intensive care units - and people are still, sadly, dying. However it's not in the sorts of numbers that we saw in our previous wave.
So the vaccines are holding the line to some degree. But there is a lot of community transmission and so we have to think about the things we can all do to keep ourselves safe from this virus.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about the uptake of the spring booster vaccine and how dangerous the BA.5 strain could be for vulnerable people?
The vaccines are very effective at protecting people from serious harm and keeping us out of hospital, but they're not particularly good at stopping transmission of the virus. That's why the spring booster JCVI guidance we followed was to offer the vaccine to everyone over 75, to adults living in care homes and clinically vulnerable people.
The uptake has been something over 80% in all those cases. So that's good, but it's not as high as it was with the first doses, the second doses and the other boosters. So I think we need to remember that vaccines are keeping us safe. There's a small number of people over 75 group who didn't get the spring booster because they were ill at the time of the vaccine and health boards are still providing a lot of service to provide the vaccine for them.
Q. So how do you expect things to progress? When are we likely to see a peak and then a fall in this wave of infections?
It's a little bit hard sometimes to look into the crystal ball, but I try and do that. I look at other countries which have been experiencing this BA.5 wave. Portugal seems to have crested the wave and the rates of hospitalisations are coming down, so if we were to follow the same curve, those rates of high levels of transmission would come down towards late July and into August, and then hospital rates as we know from previous waves tend to follow and fall as well.
Q. We're now in a position where there are no legal restrictions on our everyday lives. What would your advice be to people who are going to festivals, sporting events and other mass gatherings? Do you envisage a scenario where we may end up with further restrictions being placed upon us?
It's fantastic that we've got some semblance of our normal lives back and nobody wants to take that away. There's no appetite, really, for moving back to legislation or to mandate any sort of lockdown. That's not the space we're in because the vaccines are holding the line between high levels of community transmission and serious harm.
But there are things that all of us can do to protect ourselves and to keep others safe as well. We know that social distancing, not going to crowded places, using a face coverings all help to reduce transmission. And lateral flow tests are still available here in Wales so people can get a test and self-isolate if they test positive or if they have any respiratory symptoms.
People who are particularly clinically vulnerable need to think long and hard about whether they should go to crowded places.
Q. How concerned are you about flu this winter? Will it be as big a problem as Covid?
I am worried about influenza and what that might do for our population here in Wales in the forthcoming winter season.
For the last two years we've had very little flu and the reason for that, of course, is that those measures to protect against coronavirus also protected against influenza. But we are now seeing a resurgence of flu in the winter season in the southern Hemisphere. We are quite likely to follow the same sort of pattern here.
It's quite likely we could have both flu and coronavirus circulating in our communities in the winter months and that's why it's going to be so important that people get their flu vaccine if they're eligible, and also get the coronavirus boosters when they become available in September.
Q. Will most people be given Covid boosters in the autumn/winter?
We're waiting for the final guidance from the JCVI imminently. Once we have that we'll know exactly which type of coronavirus vaccine we should be using, and we'll know the exact groups that we need to target. We're planning for a major campaign around vaccination for both flu and coronavirus starting in the autumn.
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Visiting suspended at Swansea and Neath Port Talbot hospitals as Covid cases surge
