England’s biggest Covid wave was not one that pushed the country into lockdown, intriguing data available today shows.
Analysts from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) assessed the spread of the virus in six different waves.
Experts also calculated which age group was most likely to become infected with which Covid virus during the pandemic.
Omicron subvariants BA.4/5, which hit the UK between June and November 2022, were the most virulent, the numbers showed.
According to the ONS analysis, around 46.5 percent of the population was infected with Covid during this period.
England’s BA.5 surge came just months after then-prime minister Boris Johnson lifted all remaining pandemic-era restrictions.
An analysis by the Office for National Statistics calculated how much of each Covid wave infected England’s population. The latest, Omicron BA.4/5, was the largest, infecting 46.3 percent of the population
Ministers have decided that it is time to treat the virus as flu due to rising immunity rates.
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Some 43.6 percent of the country’s 55 million people became infected between February and June 2022 when another Omicron strain (BA.2) spread.
Winter 2021/22, in which some virus-fighting curbs were reinstated, was the third largest.
About 33.6 percent of people became infected during the spread of BA.1.
Omicron’s predecessor Delta, which was active from May to mid-December 2021, only managed to infect one in four people in England, according to the ONS.
Meanwhile, Alpha, which dominated from December 2020 to mid-May 2021, only managed to infect 8 percent of the country.
At the bottom of the ONS ranking was a group called pre-alpha variants, including the original Wuhan strain that put the world under lockdown in the first half of 2020.
These strains have never managed to infect 7 percent of the English population, with the spread of the virus contained by the draconian lockdown and social distancing measures the government imposed for most of 2020.
However, the ONS said the true extent of infection by these first Covid strains may be underestimated as no data was collected before April 2020.
People can also appear more than once in the data, capturing different variants at different stages of the pandemic.
The ONS calculated infection rates using data from its Long-Term Surveillance Study, which calculates Covid rates for the entire population using a sampling system.
The ONS estimates that fewer than 950,000 Britons carried the virus on any day of the week up to January 24. That was 15 percent less than the week before, the lowest since mid-September
This graph shows the number of recorded Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic. The latest figures show that in the last week of December there were around 100 deaths per day, compared to around 40 per week in November. The surge is a far cry from the pandemic’s darkest days in January 2021, when around 1,200 deaths were recorded each day
Using this data, they were also able to calculate how widespread the virus was in different age groups during the pandemic.
Children aged two to eleven were most affected by the BA.1 wave, with six out of ten infected.
Children aged 12 to 16 were most affected by Delta (55.1 percent), while the virus was most common among 17 to 24-year-olds (46 percent) during the BA.4/5 wave.
At first glance, BA.4/5 was the most common Covid infection in every other age group, with the exception of 25-34 year olds, for whom BA.2 was the most likely variant (48.7 percent).
Unsurprisingly, most Covid infections occurred after lockdown restrictions were lifted.
But this came after Covid vaccinations were developed and then extended to older and more vulnerable Britons.
Health chiefs have warned that new Omicron variants called Kraken and Orthrus could wreak havoc in the coming weeks.
Virus-related hospitalizations have been increasing since mid-January, data show.
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Crystal Leahy is an author and health journalist who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a background in health and wellness, Crystal has a passion for helping people live their best lives through healthy habits and lifestyles.
