July 2022 — MHCE
News from MHCE JULY 2022 EDITION Navy Implements New Policies to Make it Easier for Victims to Report Sexual Assaults See page 22 Monthly Newsletter WWW.MHCE.US This is What Living with Covid Looks Like Is Covid back? It never really went away. But yes, we are at the start of the third wave to strike the UK since December. About 1.7 million people were estimated to have had the virus last week, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) — up 23 per cent in a week, after a 43 per cent jump the week before that. Levels are at those seen at the end of April, when the last wave was on its way out. Weren’t vaccines meant to stop us catching Covid? Vaccines are good at saving lives — a paper published last week by Imperial College London found that nearly 20 million deaths were prevented in the first year of the vaccination programme — and preventing severe illness, but they are not particularly effective at stopping people catching the virus. Data from the ONS last month suggested protection against reinfection started to decline after just two weeks of vaccination, and tended to disappear after about 90 days. “Vaccines protect you from infection for a short amount of time and it wanes pretty quickly,” said Jonathan Ball, professor of virology at Nottingham University. “So we were always going to be susceptible to infection.” But even if it does not stop the virus entering the body, once the infection is lodged, the vaccine is pretty good at clearing it away. “That’s the thing that prevents you from getting seriously ill,” said Ball. And that protection is likely to persist long-term. Should we be worried? Not yet. Cases are on the rise, and each infection can be unpleasant — not to mention disruptive — but vaccines mean people who contract the virus are far less likely to get seriously ill. Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, the former deputy chief medical officer, believes Covid is now not much worse than a bad case of the flu. He told the BBC Today programme on Friday: “Covid can disrupt parts of your life when you’re poorly, but in terms of its lethality, the picture is Continued on page 13
