Millions of Brits are still taking Covid tests and wearing masks, three years after the nation was plunged into its first lockdown, as zero-Covid fanatics renew their call for ‘mitigation’ measures such as mask mandates amid a rise in infections. The Mail has the story.
Four in 10 people in the U.K. are swabbing at least once a month, exclusive polling for MailOnline reveals. The same proportion have also worn a face covering in the past 30 days, despite mandatory mask rules being dropped last January.
It comes amid a resurgence of the virus, with Covid hospitalisations nearing a three-month high and GP surgeries cancelling appointments after outbreaks caused staff shortages. And leading experts fear the outbreak, which surveillance data suggests has left one in 40 in England infected, will continue to pick up pace in the coming weeks.
Polling for this website, conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, saw 1,500 people in Britain quizzed on whether they were maintaining pandemic-era habits. When asked how regularly they had taken a Covid test in the last month, nearly one in five people (17%) said they had tested once, while a tenth have swabbed twice and 8% have tested once a week. One in 25 tested twice a week, while just 2% are checking their Covid status once a day or more. Meanwhile, six in 10 (58%) said they did not take a test.
Respondents were also asked how often they had worn a mask in the last month. The vast majority (57%) said they had not worn a mask. But 6% reported wearing a covering daily, while 7% donned a mask twice a week and one in 10 people (9%) wore one once a week. Around a tenth of people said they put on a mask once (9%) or twice (10%) per month.
It comes as a Covid monitoring project, ran by health-tech firm ZOE, found that Covid rates have been on the up for a week. It predicts nearly 1.5 million people in the UK had symptomatic Covid on Monday — up by a fifth from 1.2 million just one week earlier. Current levels are in line with those detected in mid-January, when cases were declining from the winter peak of around 1.7 million, according to ZOE data. Professor Tim Spector, the epidemiologist behind the survey, said cold weather — which encourages people to mix indoors — and children are driving the rise.
For months, health chiefs have warned about a rise in cases and hospitalisations driven by Omicron sub-variants Kraken (XBB.1.5) and Orthrus (CH.1.1). Kraken was the dominant strain in the U.K. by the end of February, causing 50.4% of cases, according to ONS data, while Orthrus was behind 19.7%.
Professor Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, called the surge “definitely something to worry about”. He told MailOnline the U.K. was in a “rather serious situation” because of the waning vaccine immunity coupled with new variants. Many bouts of these Covid infections are “neither brief nor mild”, added Professor Altmann, who is a member of the notorious Independent SAGE group that lobbied for a ‘zero-Covid’ approach.
He said: “They carry a reduced but significant risk of Long Covid. This all puts strain on the infected, strain on the workplace, on the NHS and thus, on the economy.”
“For my taste we’d be continuing to think about the mitigations,” Professor Altmann added. Such measures could include face masks in public spaces and rolling out vaccine boosters.
Perhaps the poll is biased towards people giving the ‘socially responsible’ answer, whether due to psychology or sample bias. But even so, these proportions are huge and worrying.
Worth reading in full, if you like that kind of thing.
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