Radio 4 "Today" (7:21 a.m.)
Interviewer: Why are some places, like Bolton in Lancashire, seeing higher levels of Indian variant, as it's known, of Corona Virus. Well, lots of different theories have been suggested. That the outbreak was caused by people travelling from India, or that there have been lower levels of vaccination in the hotspots. So can we really say this? Let's talk to Christina Pagel who is a mathematician who specialises in health data. She is director of the Clinical Operation Research Unit of University College London and a member of the Sage group of Scientists. Good morning.
(CP) Morning
(I) Let's examine a couple of these things. First of all the reason the variant is getting hold in certain places is because people, who are eligible to have vaccines are resisting them. Is there any evidence of that?
(CP) No, not really. If you actually look at it by age profile, then both Bolton and Blackburn have almost the same uptake, age for age as the whole of England. Also, in both places, cases are concentrated in school-age children and young adults who haven't had the opportunity to be vaccinated yet. So, I think you trying to say that it's about people being vaccinated it just doesn't hold up when you look at the evidence.
(I) And looking at the evidence again, what about the idea that these are areas where people have been travelling from India?
(CP) Certainly, we imported this variant by travel from India but it's now spreading through the community far beyond the original traveller cases. If you look at the data that's been coming out of the UK Covid Genetics Consortium, which sequences date, you can see that week on week the number of traveller cases has been steady but the number of community cases has been going up. So, it's definitely spreading in the community and it's not just about importation into certain communities.
(I) But is that how it was originally spread?
(CP) Yeh, I mean, yeh, in the same way that the dominant variant here, what we call the Kent variant, has now spread globally and through exportation from us.
(I) And early days of course, in your people are still looking at the data but what do you think we know about the transmissibility of the Indian variant at the moment?
(CP) So this is the really key thing that you need to pin down. We are pretty sure that it is more transmissible than our current dominant variant, the B117 or the Kent variant which to date has been the most transmissible variant in the world so we are pretty sure it's more transmissible. Sage said in its minutes from last week that it could be up to 50% more transmissible. We are seeing that in India and Nepal it's now rapidly become the dominant variant there. In all the countries it's been detected in, it's spreading rapidly. So we can see similar patterns across the world but exactly how much of that is because it's more transmissible is yet to be determined. But it does matter because of the Warwick models for the Sage Modeling subcommittee. So if it's 50% more transmissible that could lead to a surge that's equivalent to what we had in January even if the vaccines work just as well. Whereas, if it's only 20% more transmissible then it will peak at a much, much lower level, so it really matters that we try and pin down how much more transmissible it is
(I) Christina Pagel from UCL, thank you.
This is my transcript of the programme so I apologise for any errors but I have checked against the programe several times. I have used itelligent verbatim so there may be the odd err or um missing.
