Covid alert level gets downgraded as cases of killer virus continue to fall
The Covid alert level has been downgraded amid falling cases even though most office staff still work from home.
The chief medical officers of the UK nations and the national medical director of the NHS in England have jointly recommended that the measure moves from level three to level two.
A level two alert means that ‘Covid-19 is in general circulation but direct Covid-19 healthcare pressures and transmission are declining or stable’.
Rates of Covid in the community have decreased as have the number of cases needing hospital care, the officials added.
The chief medical officers of the UK nations and the national medical director of the NHS in England have jointly recommended that the measure moves from level three to level two
But a recent survey suggests workers are still going into the office for fewer than 1.5 days a week on average – while barely one in seven goes in on a Friday.
A poll of 50,000 workers in June and July revealed average office attendance was 29 per cent – with Mondays and Fridays the quietest.
The report found those in banking had the highest average weekly office attendance, while the tech and logistics industries were most likely to work from home.
Earlier this summer figures showed that more than a third of a desks were empty in most Whitehall departments, with the Foreign Office having the worst record.
A level two alert means that ‘Covid-19 is in general circulation but direct Covid-19 healthcare pressures and transmission are declining or stable’
The downgraded Covid alert level comes as experts warn those who have not yet had their first jab may need to hurry up.
Professor Anthony Harnden, of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, suggested it might not available in future.
Speaking at an event hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine, he said: ‘At some point we will stop the evergreen offer, which is the offer for everybody to have a primary course of vaccine, and they may have missed their chance by then.’
He said, while ‘a trickle’ of unvaccinated people would be prepared to be jabbed after discussion, for some people vaccine hesitancy was ‘entrenched’.
He described three groups – people who haven’t ‘got around to’ it, those who have problems accessing vaccination and those who are ‘never going to have it’.
Of the third group, he said: ‘It’s increasingly difficult to justify spending huge amounts of time and energy on people that are never going to have it.’
Announcing the downgrade, the chief medical officers said: ‘Hospitals and the wider health systems remain extremely busy overall but the summer BA.4 and BA.5 wave is subsiding and direct Covid severe illness is now a much smaller proportion of this.’
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