Omicron plummeting, so why does everyone still have it?

hello again i'm tim spector of the zoe covid study giving another weekly update as we see omicron cases fall across the country i'm going to be talking to you about the duration of symptoms and a look at some of the new symptoms possibly that are occurring around the gut and our digestive system and also taking a look at what's happening as kids go back to school and are they going to be ticking those rates up again so plenty to look forward to as we dive into the data and the good news is that cases are coming down fast we've got 140 thousand people reporting uh that they've got covered on a daily basis that's down 21 from last week and down 46 percent from the peak we measured uh around two weeks ago when we got to 211 000 and this may not be much consolation for those of you who are suffering at home listening to this with symptoms of covid or you just got over it or you know other people with it there's plenty of it around and we think one in 27 people are currently affected which is still really high indeed so although it's going in the right direction we know by no means out of it and as you can see on this graph most of the cases are still in unvaccinated or single vaccinated individuals although a lot of those are the younger members of the population now highest rates are across the country are currently in the northeast and northwest of england but again the trends are good even in those uh high risk areas and once again we were the first group to uh convincingly show that we'd reach the peak and things were coming down and we've confirmed it again and i think it's interesting that surveys like ours have taken on a new meaning uh in working on what's going on as the government confirmed cases are having some problems because uh they are now not confirming lateral flow tests with pcr and there's no legal requirement to actually log your positive lateral flow test anymore so i think your reports are even more valuable than usual so let's look now at hospitalization what's going on in the nhs we're getting around two thousand one hundred and seventy people at visit hospital uh on average over the last week with a diagnosis of covid that's slightly down from last week but not by very much so it stayed in this this sort of level for a while now it's never really gone above two and a half thousand which is good but still is causing some strain on the hospitals there are 713 on ventilators which is a little bit down from last week again all going in the right direction but still that easing is is really quite slow uh not out of the woods yet in terms of deaths we're seeing uh 1 610 deaths averaging over the week which is around double what it was last month but putting this into some context compared to last year it's only about a fifth of the deaths that we were seeing last year which are actually quite common at this time of year anyway and it's to be expected given the large spike in cases we saw with over 200 000 cases a day about two to four weeks later you will see some deaths because the sheer volume of people getting that and of course the other thing to bear in mind is that many of these so-called covert deaths are people who probably would have died of other causes but they may have got omicron either just before going to hospital or in hospital and either tipped them over the edge or it was uh just a random factor so hopefully the government is going to release some data uh before the end of the month that will allow us to break down those deaths more but for the moment we have to be a bit skeptical about all the death rates uh not only in the uk but around the world for this reason and we'll be keeping an eye on that for you so let's uh look regionally now and you can see from this graph that a case is coming down everywhere and you can see how london which was very high has dropped right down and we want that drop to continue the northeast and northwest um that were going up uh finally looks like they've also turned the corner and and are on their way down so that's that's good news wherever you live uh across the uk now let's see how omicron is affecting the different age groups if you look at the graph you can see that all adult ages are dropping nicely and the over 60 is really quite low levels which is all good news and the one area of concern which i did predict last week was this uptake in children and that's the blue line we can see there which uh is of some concern if we look at the next graph we can see how we've been plotting uh over the last year the rates of covet in children related to school holidays or when they're actually at school and that obviously there are these peaks around winter don't get much of these viruses in summer but you can see there is a some correlation between breaking up for school coming back and so in general we need to expect an upsurge in cases when kids do go back to school after breaks just the sheer volume of kids together and highly transmissible viruses and the downside is they they will bring that back to susceptible parents who haven't had the disease yet and really important for any parents out there to keep logging for your kids so we can get this vital data because i think it looks like they're the they're the canaries if you like in our population that'll be warning us uh what's to come and probably the new variants will also appear in school kids so let's now look at the international scene see how the uk is faring uh with other countries and for the first time in ages really we're seeing the uk having the the lowest rates amongst our european neighbors and the usa and when you when you look at the countries that are doing worse than us many of them like denmark france uh portugal italy spain um have had more severe restrictions than we have in the uk and there isn't a clear correlation between the ability to suppress the virus with those with those restrictions that's easily seen anyway it's always hard to compare countries because obviously delta and omicron came on at different times in them and they may have just delayed the actual infections now that's uh rates of infection which we know are milder in immunized people and many of those countries with high rates have higher immunization rates than than we do so it's worth looking at the uh hospitalization graph and here we're doing about average we're sort of in the middle here and uh means that uh we could do better and are still stumps drain on our nhs compared to other countries uh but it is uh a sign also that our high vaccination rates at least in the elderly is paying off um greece is faring quite badly in terms of hospitalization as well as the usa and of course the usa has much lower vaccination rates than we do and south africa interestingly is keeping hospitalizations low for reasons that aren't clear but possibly the younger population is one major reason behind that let's look at flu-like illnesses and cold-like illnesses and we can see that we're still not seeing much in the way of classic flu this year and most of the virologists i've spoken to don't really expect it uh i think this is to some extent our reduced international travelers has done this so that's great news because we were expecting a double whammy of a nasty flu but this graph which i think is unique to the zoe app shows how we've been plotting test negative respiratory infections against test positive respiratory infections and i remarked last week that you were more likely to have covid than a cold but it's omicron has now dropped further so that uh it's about 50 50 your chances of having either they're going neck and neck and luckily both colds and covid are coming down and i think i discussed last week about how the these restrictions on movement and uh distancing and masks seem to have had a slightly bigger effect on colds than on covered and we'll see how that plays out but will be very interesting to see what happens to these when restrictions are lifted as is highly likely at the end of the month now let's talk about symptoms the old broken record i'm afraid 654 days since we found out there was more to cover than just the classic three and we've been noticing that um these classic symptoms are just continually getting less and less common in our reports and in your reports that you're feeding back to us now ons the government survey division recently reported uh the same findings as us that sore throat and runny nose are actually at the top of the list but they're still dithering about whether to actually uh tell people that these are actual official signs of covid and therefore you should get a test and stealth staff isolating sore throat is the one they were focusing on because not all colds have sore throats whereas it's seems to be uh very common uh with uh omicron now uh we obviously believe people need to know these symptoms in order to act responsibly now that we've got control by able to get lateral flows and self-isolate always good to go over the top 20 again the usual suspects at the top and we have things like carpet number number six uh and other ones there that you might recognize worth looking at um fevers number 11 and then you've got all these muscle aches altered smell um and skip meals swollen glands chest pain earache and many others now there were lots of anecdotal reports about back pain and we've now added that to the list of symptoms as of today so if as part of your symptom package you've got back pain you can report it but do make sure you report even if you don't have it because um that will tell us whether this is spurious or not i want to tell you about some recent findings we've got on gut or gastrointestinal symptoms you can see from the graph here that we've plotted for you people percentage of people reporting gut symptoms uh last year compared to this year for these same winter months so we match for season when uh these viruses are more common and i think you can clearly see that we've seen a a greater uh percentage of these symptoms overall uh in recent months that would have been hard to pick up otherwise because they're not the major they're not in the top five that we tend to notice but consider when our people are reporting these and this seems to be mainly sickness um and abdominal pains particularly now it's possible this is due to another virus as well which we're not picking up or it could be that omicron is having an effect through the gut and we may be missing quite a few cases that are testing pcr or lateral flow negative in the nose but the actual infection is in our guts and our intestines and that's something we're going to be trying to do some more work on to work that out but in the meanwhile let's assume that omicron does also affect our our guts and the best protection for that is of course a good high quality diet fermented foods etc that i've written about and the more you protect your gut microbes the more you protect yourselves against all infections but particularly other gut infections it does very well also means don't forget the hygiene about washing your hands which is slightly forgotten to stop transmission of gut microbes that might contain the virus and we'll keep a close eye on this as it develops to see whether this becomes more common or whether we should be changing our testing protocols and now another bit of preliminary data that the zoe data team have been working really hard on is giving us new information about the duration of symptoms how long can we expect omicron to last and again hugely variable you know we're amazingly individual in how our immune systems respond to this so it's it's really quite hard to do this but we've shown you a couple of graphs here from uh users who get infected with omicron at least 14 days ago and compared those who got a delta back in october and november and you can see that the recovery time here uh is quite um a little bit different between the yellow and the blue bars in general recovery time is quicker for people who've had two vaccine doses with omicron although not massively so and there's perhaps more of a difference for those who've had three doses um you can you can see here so on average uh if there is such thing as an average the it was about five days to recover for omicron and seven days for delta and for those with three doses the omicron cases only took about three days to recover and delta was about six days obviously it's slightly harder because less people had breakthrough infections with delta not exactly comparable um so it looks slightly omicron looks slightly shorter in duration uh but even bigger effect is caused by the vaccines and the boosters and all this is going to change depending on your immune status whether you've had previous infections and your age etc so as an average do expect if you do get omicron to be off for around five days and as we suggested last week the government kindly obliged and changed those rules saying that if you've you've got five days or less and you're testing negative with two lateral flows um which means that you're out at day six um then a lot of people will be able to get back to life quicker and i think that's a good idea as i already suggested also seeing slightly fewer symptoms in omicron compared to delta and we do need more data so and we we want to see how it affects long code so please do keep logging for us now i want to talk briefly about lateral flow tests because although they're hard to get at the moment we understand there are big shipments on their way so they should be freely available again soon so don't panic um when should we be taking them what's the best time is it when you first get a runny nose is it uh more likely positive on day two or three if you've got a limited supply how should you use them and i think what we want people to do is to report as much as possible as clearly every day for those of you who have got lateral flow tests tell us how those positive results are looking on a daily basis if you've got them now for uh other people would also like to test whether you swab just your nose as is currently recommended or as i recommend to swab your throat and your nose to get a maximal response it looks like all the new kits are just doing the nose thinking it's not worth to the throat but of course every variant is different and it's going to have a different profile so uh let's work together on that hopefully we can come up with a plan about how best to use these because i think we're going to be using for a couple of years now in terms of wider health studies i'm delighted to say there are many months of development we've got our our health study hub launched on the app this allows you to look at various projects which we're proposing outside of coven allows you to vote on them and see which one takes your fancy we can then get an idea about which ones we launch first so we really want to see this as a partnership and i'm very excited about how we can do this so i'll put a link in the description to the website if you want to read more about it but basically just reload your app if you can't see it um that's usually the best way to reboot it so to wrap up um i think the take-home message is that omicron is still a nasty virus but it's has a slightly shorter duration than delta and particularly if you're triple vaccinated but it also seems to be more likely to affect your gut in some way so we have to expect surprises and some of those people might with gut infections might be testing negative and because you can spread this from fecal trans transfer it's important for people to start remember again the routine about washing your hands more than perhaps we've been used to as this can be as important to reduce infections now whilst the cases decline and we're at half pretty much the peak we were two weeks ago well that's great news for celebration i think that rate is going to slow down and isn't going to get anywhere near zero we're going to hover around a lower rate for a while until the weather warms up so all of us still need to take precautions realize that kids going back to school will always cause some problems and outbreaks of infections and remember that the first sign of infection is still the signs of a common cold which may be with or without sore throat so do currently suspect covert every time you get those kind of symptoms and get yourself tested and that's the best way to look after your family as well as making sure that everyone has been triple vaccinated and that keeps them out of trouble keeps them out of uh hospital please remember to like and subscribe our channel and this way you'll be informed about any new videos do share the app with those that have forgotten about it keep an eye on our website uh and uh our app for our updates and importantly stay safe and keep logging bye you

Channel: ZOE

Views: 337,684

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Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022