Covid cases are slowly falling in the UK despite a four-fold jump in infections by the highly contagious Arcturus subvariant, new figures show But there is no room for complacency, scientists say BawdenTom explains ⬇️
Over that same period, Arcturus’ share of UK cases jumped from, amounting to a 3.9-fold increase in numbers for that subvariant, according to the Covspectrum database.
“It’s not surprising that infection with 1.16 continues to grow in the UK given the increased infectiousness of this variant,” Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, toldArcturus is nearly 1.2 times as transmissible as Kraken, making it the most contagious Covid strain so far, according to a study by the University of Tokyo.
“The current restricted nature of access to Covid booster jabs is a concern,” Professor Young said. “We can only hope that better weather with less mixing in poorly ventilated spaces prevents infections from spreading and that we are not faced with any new even more infectious variants in the coming months.”
“As with all of these new sub-variants, [Arcturus] seems to have a clear advantage in terms of antibody evasion and infectivity compared with previous strains, which means that we’ll likely see yet another wave,” he told“As in 2022 and earlier this year, the size of these waves is difficult to predict.
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