UK Study: Vaccines ‘Spectacular’ in Preventing Serious Illness

The Covid vaccination programme has been linked to a substantial reduction in hospital admissions, PA Media is reporting. The PA story goes on:

Researchers examined coronavirus hospital admissions in Scotland among people who have had their first jab and compared them with those who had not yet received a dose of the vaccine.

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Strathclyde and Public Health Scotland examined data on people who had received either the Pfizer/BioNTech jab or the one developed by experts at the University of Oxford with AstraZeneca.

By the fourth week after receiving the initial dose, the Pfizer and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines were shown to reduce the risk of hospital admission from Covid-19 by up to 85% and 94%, respectively, they found.

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UK PM To Unveil New Post-Lockdown Roadmap

Today Boris Johnson is going to unveil what the government describes as its “roadmap for cautiously easing lockdown restrictions in England” and this will include the reopening of all schools on Monday 8 March. Here is our overnight preview story.

This is the third time Johnson has laid out plans for the easing of national lockdown in England and he is anxious to ensure that this one will be the last. In many respects his approach is more tentative than it was in May last year, when he launched the original Covid recovery strategy.

But in one at least one respect he is pushing forward more firmly than advisers might like. In Scotland and in Wales, which both went into this phase of lockdown ahead of England, schools are starting to reopen from today, but only for the very youngest pupils. But in England, as Nadhim Zahawi, the vaccination deployment minister told the Today programme, all pupils in England would go back to school.

Yesterday Prof John Edmunds, an epidemiologist who sits on Sage, the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, told the Andrew Marr Show that, if all pupils went back at once, he would expect R, the reproduction number, to rise to “something close to one, potentially slightly above”. (It is currently between 0.7 and 0.9 in England.) Asked if he thought primary schools should reopen first, he accepted that politicians had wider issues to consider, but went on: “Sticking to the epidemiology, yeah, of course it’s always safer to take smaller steps and evaluate.”