Norfolk's clinically vulnerable should continue to wear masks
But, Professor Paul Hunter says we shouldn't be over worried by the current uptick
Norfolk's clinically vulnerable should continue to wear masks in crowded indoor spaces, as the number of covid cases and hospitalisations start to rise again across the country.
That's according to Paul Hunter an epidemiologist from the University of East Anglia: "If you are particularly vulnerable or in a older age groups then it is sensible to continue to wear face-coverings.
"There's some reasonably good evidence that if you're wearing a face-covering and you catch covid then you've been exposed to a lower dose of the virus and then become less ill".
He went on to say there's been an uptick in infections because a new sub-variant has been spreading since the start of the year. But it's currently unclear why hospitalisations are rising so quickly: "It actually became dominant and although the rest of Omicron has been falling, all the other Omicron variants have been decreasing in numbers because now BA.2 is the most frequent variant- because that's increasing, total case numbers are increasing.
"The view is BA.2 isn't more virulent than the other Omicron variants in humans, although there's animal studies to suggest otherwise.
"Maybe that's the explanation for why we're seeing hospitalisations increasing sooner than I would have expected. But, I don't think we know for certain whether that is the explanation."
He concluded by saying we shouldn't change our vaccination strategy because of all this though: "I think it would be difficult to get into a routine where we're boosting people every six months. Hopefully, by the time people of my age group, in my mid-sixties, are coming up for our booster then overall infections will have fallen again to lower levels and we can postpone all that until the Autumn".