There’s been a bit more good news regarding Covid in the UK. The R rate which is a measure of a pathogen’s ability to spread is continuing on a downward path. According to a report on the Guido Fawkes site, the R rate in the UK stands at between 1.1 and 1.4, down from 1.2 and 1.4 last week. Yes its a small movement but it’s a movement in the correct direction which is downwards.
This drop in the R rate is in spite of the gradual opening up of the economy and society since May of this year. There is of course the possibility that it might rise slightly now that the vast majority of restrictions have been eased but looking at the way things are going I believe that it is less likely to rise too high because of the success of Britain’s vaccination programme.
Vaccination has ensured that the Covid virus has less readily available vulnerable hosts where it can replicate and spread. The vaccines are working in a two fold manner. They are making it harder for the virus to infect vaccinated individuals and are also ensuring that when a person does get a breakthrough covid infection then that person is less likely to suffer from a serious illness.
Yes we have hospitalisations but the numbers of these are no way as bad as those parts of the world that have, possibly because of the influence of the anti-vaxxer crowd, low levels of vaccination. The US state of Alabama for example has horrifically low levels of covid vaccination, one source said that it was only 33.7% when compared to the UK where 71% have had both doses of the Coronavirus vaccine. The result of the difference in vaccination figures is that Alabama had by the 20th July over 460 people hospitalised due to Covid compared to the UK with under 1000 covid hospitalisations on July 20th across the entire UK nation of 68 million people. Alabama’s population by way of comparison is a mere 4.9 million. The Alabama figures for hospitalisation represent a much higher proportion of people in the population afflicted by Covid to the extent that they need to enter hospital than do the figures from the United Kingdom. The low vaccine take up rates in Alabama have allowed the covid virus to spread more easily than in high vaccine uptake countries like the UK. The Alabama situation is an absolute tragedy because there are lives lost that could have been saved by timely vaccination.
We should rejoice at the downward trend for covid spread in the UK but there’s no room for complacency. We cannot beat covid or make it into a bearable endemic background pathogen without a much higher level of vaccination. 71% of fully vaccinated adults is good and something to be celebrated but we need to get the adult vaccination rate up to between 90 and 95% in order to truly be able to say that covid is back in its box. We might not even be able to get to that stage until the future child safe covid vaccines come on stream after 2023. However, getting to the position where 90 – 95% of adults are vaccinated will go a very long way to reducing the spread and medical effects of covid.
Britain is lucky. The anti vaccination nutcases don’t seem to be as influential in the UK as they are in the USA. I don’t know why this could be? It could be that Britons are generally more scientifically literate than Americans but having seen the PISA education ratings, we in Britain are not exactly as advanced as some other nations, such as Japan are with science education. Britain and the US are relatively evenly matched with science education and science literacy according to PISA ratings, so why anti vaccination nutcases are more influential in the USA when compared to the UK must be down to other factors.
Vaccination is the only way out of the covid nightmare at least in the short to medium term. No amount of Ivermechtin or HCQ quackery will suffice. If there is one piece of good that I would like to see come out of the covid pandemic it is that there should be more research and effort put into formulating anti viral medications. At present this research is, like with vaccines, not generally a priority for pharmaceutical companies as there isn’t that much in the way of return in it. Most of the money that pharma companies earn comes from providing medications for the cancers and heart disease that afflicts the wealthy West. But anti virals might be vital in the future not just for dealing with covid but for the next pandemic which will surely come and which might be far worse than covid. In the meantime more people need to be vaccinated in order that we can recover our economies and our societies and not end up like some of the US states that have woefully low vaccination rates and the tragic loss of life that accompanies such low vaccination rates.
