16,000 Hospitalised: Van Tam Warns Covid Defence Can't Go to Sleep

For NHS planners and clinicians, Jonathan Van Tam's warning is a reminder that Covid-19 behaves less like flu and more like an unpredictable year-round respiratory threat. With 16,000 hospitalisations in England last year and a July 2026 summer surge, the case for integrating Covid surveillance and vaccination into routine respiratory protection programmes is stronger than ever.

Sir Jonathan Van Tam, the former deputy chief medical officer for England whose plainspoken Downing Street briefings earned him a knighthood and the nickname "JVT", has issued a warning that Britain's Covid-19 "defence can't go to sleep". In an interview with the Mirror, also carried by AOL on 12 September 2026, Van Tam called on people aged over 75, care home residents, and anyone whose immune system is suppressed to take up the NHS autumn booster. His core argument is that Covid-19 is now one of the UK's recurrent human respiratory viruses, but unlike flu and RSV, it has not yet become seasonal and can surge at any time of year.

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For NHS planners and clinicians, Jonathan Van Tam's warning is a reminder that Covid-19 behaves less like flu and more like an unpredictable year-round respiratory threat.

Van Tam's warning is not abstract. He cites NHS England data showing 16,000 people were hospitalised with Covid-19 over the past year, a reminder that although current variants are less likely to cause severe symptoms than earlier pandemic strains, the virus still has the capacity to kill and consume hospital resources. He told the Mirror that this level of harm sits beneath public consciousness, partly because people frequently mistake Covid-19 for a cold, flu, or another respiratory illness. As he put it, doctors "have never been very good at separating the different respiratory viruses out on the basis of symptoms." That diagnostic ambiguity creates a public-health blind spot: if mild infections are labelled as colds, surveillance systems may miss the early stages of a surge until hospital admissions begin to climb.

The non-seasonal behaviour is a critical challenge for the NHS. Van Tam noted that surveillance data showed a summer surge in Covid-19 in July 2026, during Britain's heatwaves, while flu typically peaks around Christmas and RSV earlier in winter. This means a health system that prepares for respiratory viruses only in autumn and winter could be repeatedly caught out. It also complicates messaging for vaccination campaigns, because the public has been conditioned to think of respiratory vaccines as an October-to-December activity. Van Tam is effectively arguing for year-round readiness and booster campaigns timed to real-time epidemiological signals rather than fixed calendar months.

On access, the current NHS booster programme covers all over-75s, care home residents, and people with health conditions that suppress their immune systems. For everyone else, pharmacies are offering private Covid jabs at between £85 and £100. This two-tier model creates a protection gap for younger people with underlying vulnerabilities, unpaid carers, and people living with high-risk individuals who don't qualify for free jabs but may not be able to afford private vaccination. It also raises equity and public-health questions: if the virus can surge in summer, the same out-of-season access problem may recur outside the autumn booster window.