Had a visit to the hospital yesterday to see a senior respiratory consultant after over 2 years of waiting. Asked about covid and if particular if I was wrong to be feeling anixious when everyone else seems to be acting like nothing ever happened. To be honest I was hoping for a 'if you're double jabbed there's little to worry about' type answer for re-assurance but I got nothing like that. Wasn't sure if I should post what she said but figured I might as well in case anyone is interested in an experts opinion.
Basically she said this is a long way from being over and people are too comfortable & complacent. Said it was best to look at hospitalisations & deaths rather than cases and both those figures are significantly higher than they were heading into last winter and rising.
Said the 'in the wild' data indicates that vaccination does lower the chance of getting covid and the risk of passing it on if you do have it but people have focused on a single study which shows that in lab conditions, where nose swabs were taken, there could be the same viral load in the vaccinated and unvaccinated but even that showed that in the vaccinated the viral load dropped far quicker than in the unvaccinated.
Also said she hoped that vaccine passports and masks would be introduced, this was before the government announced the winter plan, to minimise hospitalisations without the need for another lockdown.
Finally said people are using terms like 'overwhelm the NHS' without understanding what they are talking about as they say levels aren't as high as last year and therefore the NHS can cope but that required shutting down everything that wasn't critical care to concentrate on covid. The levels of covid hospitalisations the NHS can cope with before other services are impacted is far lower and they're already, at least locally, very close to that level.
As I was leaving I asked specifically about attending matches. She said personally she wouldn't even consider going to an event with a large crowd of unmasked, and potentially unvaccinated, people.
Not exactly the reassurance I was looking for. On the bright side no cancer, no additional respiratory issues on top of what I already knew about, no issues with immune system, so onto another waiting list (12 months or longer thanks to the backlog) for another department and more tests.