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London is currently bang in the middle of a fresh Covid drama. The strain known as Omicron is running amok, putting extreme pressure on the hospitality and entertainment sectors, just as businesses were expecting a bumper Christmas season.
Southwark and Hackney have been hit hardest, with cases in those areas increasing by more than 70 percent last week. To make matters (much) worse, London has one of the highest numbers of unvaccinated people in the country. According to official figures, approximately a third of Londoners haven’t received a single jab, and we’re also running behind on the booster rollout.
The accepted reason for this is that London’s population is generally younger than the rest of the UK’s, and therefore statistically less inclined to get vaccinated. The vaccination scheme was initially targeted at older people and the most vulnerable, meaning young Londoners had to wait longer (and it seems many of them may have never had the jab at all). However, London’s vaccination rates are low across the board, with proportionally fewer people older than 35 years old having had a jab than those of the same age in all other English regions.
So are Londoners really that resistant to getting vaccinated? Well, it seems like there might be some inaccurate statistics at play. We spoke to two experts who highlighted some explanations for London’s unusually low numbers.
‘London has a very mobile population, people come and go to and from London, they move around within London,’ said GP and professor of primary care and public health at Imperial College Azeem Majeed. ‘That means that people don’t always have a GP in London and some haven’t actually changed their GP, which means they may not get called up for vaccination.’
With people coming in and out of the city every day, and traveling internationally, it’s hard for the Greater London Authority to keep track of exactly how many people live in the city. ‘London has quite a high number of people who were vaccinated overseas,’ said Professor Majeed. ‘So that will also suppress the overall rate, because you’ve got people who were actually vaccinated who are “not coming forward locally”, but because they were vaccinated in, say, the US or Europe, that doesn’t then show on the NHS database.’
It’s hard for the GLA to keep track of exactly how many people live in the city
Vaccine epidemiology professor Mark Jit pointed out that ‘In the last two years, there have been a lot of people who moved between London boroughs and moved out of London. The London population might not be completely up to date. The statistics from the ONS and Greater London Authority are doing a good job, but this is happening on a daily basis, so they can’t be up-to-the-minute up-to-date.’
In addition, the government has reported difficulty in reaching certain socio-economic, ethnic and cultural groups who often don’t have access to many healthcare services. And then there’s good old-fashioned human complacency: ‘An element of vaccine fatigue is settling in. Some people are asking if they’ll need a fourth injection next year,’ said Professor Majeed.
So, perhaps we’re not quite the outlaws the numbers make us out to be and there’s hope for us yet. Professor Majeed’s last piece of advice? ’Get vaccinated!’
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