Health chiefs have issued an urgent appeal for people to get vaccinated as the UK appears to be heading for an early flu season. NHS medical director Professor Frankie Swords said hospitals were very busy and seeing “slightly ominous early signs of winter pressure”.
She added: “It is very early in the season, but the number of admissions for flu are the highest I can remember seeing at this time of year. And it has coincided with the start of the expected increase in Covid cases. This is coming on the back of the busiest summer we have ever had in our emergency departments.”
Record hospital pressure
Hospital bed occupancy in England was at 95% in September and almost 100,000 instances of corridor care were reported. Prof Swords added: “Although the weather’s still nice, and perhaps people aren’t thinking too much about flu at the moment, please, we are acting early and I would encourage people to act early because winter is coming and the pressure is going to build as temperatures fall.
“We have made vaccination as easy as possible this year. 3.9 million people have already had their flu vaccinations since the start of September. If you’re eligible, get your vaccine now. Use the National Booking Service, use the NHS app, you can do it by phone as well [by calling] 119 free of charge.”
Early rise in positive tests
The UK Health Security Agency said the flu season had not officially started and activity remains at baseline levels. But the first weekly winter respiratory virus surveillance report showed positive tests have been rising since mid-August. Figures for September were higher than at the same point during the last four years, experts said.
Consultant medical epidemiologist Dr Jamie Lopez Bernal said the reason for the early rise was not clear. He added: “There was a late season in the southern hemisphere which means there are more importations towards the start of our season — that could be a factor.”
Vaccine effectiveness and Covid
Australia saw an unusual late-winter surge with high cases extending into September. More than 31,000 flu cases were reported in the two weeks to September 6, up 27% on the previous fortnight. Experts said the vaccine in use protects against all three types of flu virus, although it is too early to know which will dominate this year.
Dr Lopez Bernal said analysis by the World Health Organisation suggested one of the strains, influenza A H1N1, may have “drifted” from the strain used in the vaccine due to genetic mutations. But the UKHSA’s national programme lead for flu immunisation, Dr Suzanna McDonald, said the vaccine still provided strong protection against a drifted strain last year.
She added: “Typically for flu vaccines we would see effectiveness of around 30% to 60%, in terms of protecting people from going into hospital. That varies based on age — we tend to see much higher vaccine effectiveness in children and the lowest in older adults because their immune systems don’t work as well. Last season…particularly in children we were nudging up towards 70% vaccine effectiveness in kids, so that is really great news. Flu is very unpredictable, we don’t know which virus will dominate this season or if we’ll see all three. But the message is that the flu vaccine protects against three different flu viruses, so please get vaccinated as soon as possible.”
Dr Alex Allen, a consultant epidemiologist with the UKHSA, said positive tests for Covid have also started to rise in line with expectations. However, there is no evidence that the so-called American strain now circulating in the UK — also known as Stratus or XFG — is more likely to cause severe illness. Dr Allen added: “In fact, the current running autumn vaccination programme has vaccines that are specifically targeted against the XFG strain, so we’d be expecting that to have a significant protective effect.”
