Covid Perhaps No Longer ‘Most Important’ Health Threat, Says Dr Jenny Harries

Covid may no longer be the most “significant” threat to health, said Dr Jenny Harries.
The chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency said today that Covid may not be more dangerous than the flu, as she warned that there will be weaker immunity to the disease this year.
She said: “It’s important to remember that for an average flu season there are about 11,000 deaths per year, that’s somewhere between four (one thousand) to 22,000 in the past four to five years.
“So we are starting to move to a situation where, maybe Covid is not the most important element, and many of those affected will of course have other co-morbidities, which will make them vulnerable to serious illness. but also for other reasons. “
It comes as the NHS has launched its biggest flu vaccination campaign amid fears that flu deaths may be the worst in 50 years due to lockdowns and social distancing.
More than 35 million people will be offered flu shots this winter, as prolonged restrictions on social contact have left Britain with little immunity.
Officials fear this winter could see as many as 60,000 flu deaths – the worst number in Britain since the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic – without heavy vaccine use.
There are concerns about the effectiveness of this year’s bites as well, as the lack of flu last year made it more difficult for scientists to sample the virus and predict dominant strains.
Meanwhile, Dr Harries added that the dominance of the Delta variant in the world has seen other variants of the coronavirus “die out,” but warned that we still need to “stay vigilant.”
“With Delta’s dominance, it appears that many other variants detected are on the verge of extinction, and a number of variants under study have increased slightly, we have seen cases and they have become extinct,” he said. she told the Andrew Marr Show.
However, she warned that it was imperative to “stay vigilant” as she said it was “still the first days of a new virus”.
Dr Jenny Harries also said the difficulty moving forward is predicting what will happen with Covid-19, as immunity to vaccines wanes in some older people.
“We have obviously had very good use of vaccines and this is now preventing very significant amounts of hospitalizations and deaths,” she said, adding that “the difficulty is at this stage of the pandemic, that is one of the most difficult times to predict what’s to come “.
She said: “We have different levels of vaccination, we have a bit of declining immunity in the elderly, which is why we are now starting to put in place a Covid booster vaccine.
“We have slightly different efficacy in the different vaccinations that have been provided.”
Dr Harries also said children wearing masks at school would not be at the top of his list of Covid safety measures.
His comments come after education unions urged the government to consider reintroducing additional coronavirus safety measures in schools.
However, she said she believed the important thing was to make sure that “children are not in school if they are genuinely contagious”.
“We have a very good testing program and we know that at the start of the quarter we were expecting an increase in the number of cases,” she said.
“I think it’s really important. We saw an increase in cases when they were detected when the kids came back, it went down a bit, and then we saw another increase.”