Flu cases may be ‘starting to settle’ in some areas, NHS chief says

Flu cases may be “starting to settle in some parts of the country”, according to the chief executive of NHS England.

It comes as experts said there is no evidence this season will be worse than previous years, although “nobody really knows” when cases will peak.

There were also warnings that the country knows more about Covid-19 than flu and is “floundering” when it comes to treatments for the virus.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said the “time has not yet come” for the public to wear masks and said there is no need for a mask mandate.

Health leaders have issued warnings over a “super flu” sweeping the nation in recent weeks.

Figures published by the NHS show flu cases at a record level for the time of year after jumping 55% in a week.

Speaking to MPs on the Health and Social Care Committee, NHS England chief executive Sir Jim Mackey said he “has heart” the health service can learn from previous years.

“We’ve actually had our first contact with winter in a pretty nasty way over the last month,” he said.

“Two weeks ago, I really worried about… the way flu was accelerating the pressure in certain systems.

“That looks like it might be starting to settle, still early days, but might be starting to settle in some parts of the country.

“The way the service has held on to handover performance and cat(egory) two performance, especially, which has been the main focus for the NHS over recent years, I think does give us heart that we’ve been able to learn from last year and make some adjustments.”

On mask wearing, Mr Streeting, who also appeared in front of MPs on Wednesday, said: “No, the time has not yet come for everyone to wear masks.

“But what we are absolutely supporting frontline leaders to do is to determine whether, given the pressures they are under, whether it’s the right thing to do to ask visitors to hospitals or other NHS or care settings to wear masks to protect themselves and others.

“There will be places where that’s happening.

“It will be done on an informed way, on the basis of the conditions they’re operating under, and most people will happily comply with that.

“But at this stage, there’s no need to kind of mandate mask wearing or to ask everyone around the country to do the same.”

It comes as leading flu experts shared their perspective on cases this year.

Dr Leon Peto, a consultant in infectious diseases and microbiology at the University of Oxford, said: “The data that we have so far doesn’t prove that this is anything very different to a normal, significant flu year.

“But having said that, even in the flu years that we’ve had recently since Covid, it has led to many thousands of deaths and lots of severe illness, lots of disruption.

“There are a couple of things that have obviously made people more concerned recently, in terms of the new variant and in terms of the early transmission.

“But we don’t have evidence that it’s going to be worse than previous years, although nobody really knows where the peak is going to be until after we’ve passed it.

“We may be nearing a peak. Now it may be that actually there’s a bigger peak than there has been in recent years, in which case it can cause a lot of deaths.”

On flu treatments, Prof Sir Peter Horby, director of the Pandemic Sciences Institute and Moh Family Foundation professor of emerging infections and global health at the University of Oxford, said: “We know more about Covid than we do about the treatment of flu.

“We have good diagnostics, we have relatively reasonable vaccines, but we really need to make sure that we have better vaccines.

“We don’t yet have an mRNA vaccine for flu. We don’t yet have a universal vaccine for flu that covers against different variations of the flu.”

Sir Peter added that “we have a really poor pipeline of treatments for flu”.

He said: “We’ve got 2,500 people in hospital as of today, at least, and we don’t have any treatments that are proven to be effective in patients with severe influenza.

“We’ve got more treatments for Covid, which is five years old, than we do for flu, which is 90 years old.

“There’s no reason for that other than lack of investment and lack of adequate trials.”

New figures on flu cases will be published on Thursday.