60% of UK COVID-19 hospital admissions are unvaccinated people

pharmafile | July 20, 2021 | News story | Manufacturing and Production  

The Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance has said that 60% of people being admitted to hospital with COVID-19 are unvaccinated.

This is a correction on a previous remark where Vallance said that that figure was for double jabbed people.

He later corrected himself on Twitter, saying the original statistic was false.

He posted: “Correcting a statistic I gave at the press conference today, 19 July.

“About 60% of hospitalisations from COVID are not from double-vaccinated people, rather 60% of hospitalisations from COVID are currently from unvaccinated people.”

Speaking at the briefing, Sir Patrick said hospitalisations could rise to over 1,000 a day.

He said: “But the rates should be lower than they have been previously because of the protective effects of vaccination.”

“They’re very, very effective, but not 100%, and as a higher proportion of the population is double-vaccinated, it’s inevitable that those 10% of that very large number remain at risk, and therefore will be amongst the people who both catch the infection and end up in hospital.”

“In the winter wave, we were up to around 60,000 people testing positive per day.

“We are now somewhere on towards 50,000. So we’re quite close to the size of the winter wave of infections and this is going to increase.”

“But most of the models are suggesting that there should be a peak and start seeing some sort of either plateau or decrease over August.

“And at that point, if things continue to increase at the rate they are – and as I said at the outset, there is something like 50,000 or near 50,000 cases per day, or positives per day, at the moment being detected – with a doubling time of 11 days, you can see that that gets to pretty high numbers very quickly.

“And another doubling time will take you to even higher numbers, of course – that would be really quite, quite worrying. So we would like to see some flattening of this, some decrease in the trajectory, and ideally, as you rightly say, you’d like to see this coming down by September, as return of schools would add another pressure on top of that.”

England’s deputy chief medical officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam added the uncertainty would be “driven by human behaviour over the next four to six weeks”.

Lilly Subbotin

Related Content

No items found

Latest content