An NHS boss has said vaccination appears to have “broken the chain” between catching coronavirus and becoming seriously ill.
NHS Providers chief executive, Chris Hopson, said the number of people in hospital with the Covid-19 variant first detected in India – known as the Delta variant – was not increasing “very significantly”.
Many of those in hospital in Bolton – which has the highest number of cases of the Indian variant in England – were younger than in previous waves of the pandemic, he told BBC Breakfast.
“The people who came in this time round were actually a lot younger and were a lot less at risk of very serious complication, less at risk of death, and what that means is that they were less demand on critical care,” he said.
“What we think we can start to say now, based on that experience, is that it does look as though the vaccines have broken the chain between catching Covid-19 and potentially being very, very seriously ill and potentially dying.
“There were very, very few people who have had those double jabs and had been able to have that build-up of protection after those jabs.”
In the most recent phase of the pandemic the number of people in hospital in Bolton with Covid-19 peaked at 50, compared to 170 in November and 150 in January and February, Mr Hopson said.
