Covid cases rise past January peak across UK

A rise in the number of people in the UK testing positive for Covid has led to a number of hospitals reintroducing mask wearing and health professionals urging the public to be vigilant.

The UK Health Security Agency’s Covid dashboard shows that the positivity rate for those taking a test was over 14 percent from 22 to 29 June — above the May peak and even above the winter peak of 13 percent recorded on 2 January 2024.

Several hospitals in England now require patients, visitors and staff to wear masks in clinical areas until further notice, reported The Mirror.

Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said, “The surveillance of covid cases in the UK is far less intensive than it once was, so it is difficult to track the rise and fall of waves of infection, or to assess the severity of different variants, or to know how effective the vaccines are against them.

“Even so, there is a widespread impression of a growing 2024 summer wave, much as we saw in 2021 when (coincidently perhaps) there was also a Euro football tournament, and evidence that this contributed significantly to the spread of infection,” reports the BMJ.

Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, told the i newspaper: “While hospitalisations due to Covid remain stable, there is evidence that the virus is continuing to spread in the community.”