Is COVID going around in the United Kingdom?

With mass community testing wound down, UKHSA tracks COVID-19 mainly through hospital admissions, the SARI-Watch severe-illness network, laboratory-confirmed cases from NHS settings, and variant sequencing by the COG-UK successor programme. The UKHSA Dashboard publishes these indicators weekly. Wastewater monitoring, run in partnership with the Environment Agency in earlier years, has been scaled back but selected signals continue to inform the overall picture.

COVID-19 is now endemic in the UK and continues to cause hospitalisations and deaths each winter, concentrated in older adults and people with weakened immune systems. For most vaccinated adults with prior infections, current variants tend to cause an illness broadly similar to flu. Long COVID remains a concern and is monitored through ONS surveys and NHS specialist clinics. Risk is managed via targeted boosters rather than population-wide restrictions.

COVID-19 in the UK has not locked into a single seasonal rhythm. A winter wave has recurred each year since 2020, usually overlapping with flu and RSV, but additional waves have appeared in spring and late summer whenever a new variant with an immune-escape advantage has emerged. UKHSA's variant surveillance is therefore watched alongside hospitalisations for early signs of a resurgence.

The NHS offers seasonal COVID-19 boosters to groups advised by the JCVI, typically including adults aged 65 and over, residents in care homes for older adults, people aged 6 months to 64 in clinical risk groups, pregnant women, and frontline health and social care workers. Eligibility is reviewed each autumn and spring. Booster uptake is reported by UKHSA alongside flu vaccination figures.

Yes, SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, and new sublineages are detected by routine UK sequencing. Most emerging variants cause illness broadly comparable to their predecessors, but occasional lineages with clear immune escape can drive faster, larger waves. UKHSA publishes variant technical briefings describing growth advantage and, where relevant, any signals around severity or vaccine effectiveness.