Symptom change and waning protection

a warm welcome back it's still friday the 10th of september now there's some interesting data from the covid symptom study app with tim spector in king's college london this is the largest study of its type in the world and hopefully well i know many of you like me are filling it in every day now i want to bring some information from there so let's go and have a look at that now now here we have they always do a good logo so that's that's the logo for this one now this is data from the 21st of august to the 4th of september covered case is no longer climbing as feared so tim spector last week was thinking that with schools going back and some pop festivals that we've had cases would start to rapidly escalate and i must say i agreed with him but they haven't it just shows you i mean you know these are the best tim spector's one of the leading epidemiologists in the country and he couldn't even predict this pandemic from from one week to the next and i must say i agreed with tim spector so um it's it's just very very hard to predict with the exception of scotland where cases in scotland are going up quite dramatically and no one's that clear why so it really seems bizarre if scotland was was a outside country would be on the red list and yet people are traveling back and forward so these these amber traffic light systems are somewhat arbitrary given that scotland is free movement and really it should be on the red list because the cases are so high in it so slightly encouraging probably the part of the reason that cases are so high in scotland is that schools have gone back but they're going to schools are back in the in the rest of the country now as well so it really is very hard to uh to explain what's going on but this is this is the case so no longer climbing a speed is the heading current case is about 51 000 52 000 symptomatic cases per day and of course the coverage symptom tracker app is reporting symptomatic cases which means it's almost the same well it is essentially live data it's updated on the day so this is this is as live data as we get now this data here that we're looking at now from the 21st of august to the 4th of september it's based on about a million weekly reports and specifically it's based on 31 075 pcr and lateral flow tests so these are really good chunky data sets here down 9.2 percent from the 57 158 on average new daily cases the week before so it is it is encouraging and tim specter's unable to give a reason for it so um it's unlikely i could think of one if he can't think of one so it's interesting is it community immunity starting to develop to some extent well let's hope that is indeed the case now in the fully vaccinated population now this is going to be a concern 17 647 symptomatic cases in the fully vaccinated now i haven't got data on it now but protection against hospitalization and severe illness which had been lasting very well in the fully vaccinated is now starting to wane it is starting to wane a bit a bit it's not waning as much as the uh as the protection against infection is waning but it's starting to wane a bit it is concerning and uh that may mean that booster doses become more probable it really is an ongoing drama this pandemic it just keeps surprising you on a week to week basis so last week's average was 17 342 so these are symptomatic cases remember in the fully vaccinated so that is a pretty high number nearly getting on for eighteen thousand new cases are highest amongst the among the uh naught to eighteens and eighteen to thirty five you also see a graphic of that in a minute on average one in 90 people in the uk has got symptomatic covered this is still very high prevalence ukr values round about one wales and scotland are higher and as i say we don't really know why they're higher but but they are the cultural behavior and everything in scotland and england as well seems to be very similar and yet these are the differences that the data is showing scotland and england cases remain highest in north scotland england cases highest in the younger groups not to 19. now long covered is a long standing concern and the numbers are way too high 894 people predicted to be developing long coverage lasting for more than 12 weeks per day now it's being doubly vaccinated i think slightly about half or slightly more than halves the risk of getting covered so being fully vaccinated is your best current protection against long covered but it's not an absolute protection and these numbers are still way too high unfortunately so that is a lot of people still developing long covered and we know that tragically some of these people are still going to have a longish term perhaps up to a year or more it's great the direct quotes from tim spector it's direct to see the return to schools and summer festivals haven't yet resulted in a spike of cases as feared as we were predicting just last week worse in scotland rates are still rising scottish hospitals could soon be overwhelmed now this is a real problem what is going to happen are there going to be localized restrictions we don't know yet that's a shout for the politicians of course but hospital conditions in scotland are starting to near capacity now and of course a lot of people that should be getting all the routine treatment they deserve and not getting it so scotland is the main worrying part of the united kingdom at the moment it makes it clear we can't be complacent about covered 19 as winter approaches because we are still protected by a really good summer that we've had in the uk as winter approaches it is a concern still producing too many cases of long-covered of course and hospitalizations because of the lack of vaccination or the lack of double vaccination as well and now for 521 days zoe has been zoe and tim spectre have been asking the government to change their uh description of the symptoms so it's not just fever it's not just cough although it can be but these other symptoms are more common so uk rates are highest in europe if the government continues with no restrictions then at least it should give us the right advice and this is what tim spector's just published on his video today do check out the link excellent video and these are well worth memorizing really rooney knows 77 of people who are doubly vaccinated present with a runny nose this is actually this data is true for people that are doubly vaccinated and children so 77 particularly presenting with the running nose 74 with headache 67 with sneezing 52 with sore throat and 52 with loss of smell now people can still get the cough they can still get the fever it's just less common so these are the symptoms to give a high index of suspicion means that people should stay at home stopping the spread that could be why cases are so much higher other countries have taken on the advice of the current coverage symptom tracker app whereas the uk government as yet has not and this is really hard to explain i don't know why they haven't really don't know now let's look at some graphics just get rid of me for a minute so here we see some graphics now this is the um there's a zoe covered study uk incidents figures results over time total number of new cases and new cases they're fully vaccinated so what we see here this is the total number of new cases this is the cases in the fully vaccinated and we see that that gap is narrowing so more cases are occurring in the fully vaccinated unfortunately is the story of that graph and the trend does seem to be up the way in fact the trend is definitely up the way there now be interesting when we start getting data on those that are fully vaccinated and re-exposed to the natural infection that data is being collected now so people that have been vaccinated or anyone really the test positive is now going for antibody studies both at the time they're in fact initially present with symptoms and i think it's a month later so we should be have we'll have a whole massive cohort of people in the uk have been doubly vaccinated and have had the natural infection and we will know that for a fact and then what we will see i predict is that these people will be much more protected against reinfection much more protected against severe disease but we don't know that yet but that's what we are that's all i'm predicting certainly really quite uh quite with a quite a high degree of certainty from what i understand about the immune systems in the body this next one incidence by age group so a bit hard to see here but we see that the younger age groups naught to 18 and 18 to 35 are the highest this down here is the the 70 to 75 an overage group this is the 55 to 75 so we see it's younger people that are now more likely to be infected prevalence by region um now flatish you know but this is the line here for scotland look at that wow i mean why is scotland going up so steeply scotland is going up other areas are flattish which is good to see predicted long covered now this is the um this is the predicted long covered in the second way before we had vaccination this is the predicted long covered in the current third wave where we have vaccination and we can see that many less people are getting long covered now because they're doubly vaccinated but we can see that the protection there is perhaps less than 50 percent roughly so it's still not a good situation so yes we are protected yes we're getting less long covered than we did in the in the second wave without such good vaccine protection but it's still much higher than we would like to see and again will we see a waning in the protection from long covered in people that are doubly vaccinated and are not exposed to the infection or will we see that there's less long-confident people that are doubly vaccinated than exposed to the infection to get a booster we're going to know that in the next few months we don't know yet i i suspect that will also be the case as natural immunity starts to develop but we can't speculate too much on that because we simply don't know yet so this is this is comparison of the prevalence of zoe figures and uh confirmed cases by the office of national statistics so this basically is showing that it's working now of course the the zoe data is always higher because this is picking up symptomatic individuals and some of these are asymptomatic but we can see pretty good comparative lines here between the zoe data there and this is the average confirmed cases by the office for national statistics so we can see pretty good consistency there in these different data sets so that's all i wanted to say really today i'm just going to show you one more thing though um and this is pretty is it's not a good situation um it's north korea um situation north korea just reading uh in the popular press today about north korea um the north korean authorities seem to be seeing the pandemic as a real existential threat and completely closed the borders trade from china is virtually non-existent and this means that there's a lot of food shortages in north korea it's just a terrible situation how many covered cases there are while you make up a number i make up a number that they're both equally valid we simply don't know but the north korean authorities are actually shooting people or indeed animals that go across the border this is being rigorously enforced north korea is more isolated than ever so just spare a thought for the people under one of the world's most oppressive regimes so there we go we really are waiting for this antibody data to come through i'm hoping that's going to start coming through soon because if the antibody data is showing that people that have been doubly vaccinated and while they still enjoy a good level of protection from double vaccination of being exposed to the natural form of the virus if that's greatly boosting the immunity that people enjoy then that may well mean that the government changed their advice allowing people to become naturally infected after vaccination we're not there yet but that could be the way that longer-term herd immunity or community immunity is achieved in the shorter term the waning of the protection from the vaccines means in my view it's more likely that the united states and the uk will be going for a booster dose of vaccine this autumn stroke early winter and things could get more severe as the weather gets worse in the northern hemisphere so we've got this final hopefully final flow of the pandemic over the closing months of 2021 we will keep watching with interest and thank you for watching this talk

Channel: Dr. John Campbell

Views: 324,070

Keywords: physiology, nursing, NCLEX, health, disease, biology, medicine, nurse education, medical education, pathophysiology, campbell, human biology, human body

Id: ASq0_qUo2dA

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021