Two other new findings will be worrying ministers as the roulette ball completes its final few loops of the wheel. Late on New Year's Eve, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) released a report which showed that vaccine efficacy against hospitalisation was not as good as initially hoped.Booster jabs work well for 10 weeks before starting to wane, but two doses of vaccine were estimated to have an efficacy of just 52 per cent after six months.
"These estimates suggest that vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease with the omicron variant is significantly lower than compared to the delta variant and wanes rapidly," said the report.
The UKHSA also found the virus itself may not be as mild as it was in South Africa, where night curfews and other restrictions to contain infections have now been lifted.
An updated analysis of over a million cases by the Biostatistics Unit of the University of Cambridge suggested the risk of hospital admission with omicron was approximately a third of that for delta in the UK, falling to about half if "emergency care" was included.
From The Telegraph article.