A new modelling study suggests that the United Kingdom’s Covid-19 vaccination drive will bring down death rates. However, hospital and intensive care (ICU) admissions will likely to decline only after several weeks, with significant reductions would be seen by March-end.

The UK vaccination plan aims to vaccinate around 15 million citizens in the country by next Monday. But, according to the latest data, the government will convene a meeting and possibly exceed this target.

The authors noted that the reason vaccination will affect deaths, hospital admissions, and ICU admissions at different rates is due to the different age ranges for each.

The average (median) age of patients dying with Covid-19 is 83 years, whereas the average age of those hospitalized is 73 years and those admitted to intensive care are 61 years.

Moreover, around three-quarters of Covid-19 deaths recorded in the UK so far have been in people aged 75 years and over. Thus, the first phase of vaccination will have a proportionally greater effect on deaths.

The model predicts that with the vaccination of the most vulnerable groups, daily deaths will reduce by some 88 per cent by the second half of March. At the same time, hospital admissions will have fallen by around two thirds (66 per cent) and ICU admissions by only a little more than one third (36 per cent).

The findings of the study were published in the journal EurekAlert!.

 

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