Sixty percent of people being admitted to hospital with COVID-19 have had two doses of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance.

Speaking at a Downing Street news briefing, he said: “In terms of the number of people in hospital who’ve been double vaccinated, we know it’s around 60% of the people being admitted to hospital with COVID.

“We do expect there to be over 1,000 people per day being hospitalised with COVID because of the increase in infections.

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“But the rates should be lower than they have been previously because of the protective effects of vaccination.”

He said this was not surprising “because the vaccines are not 100% effective”.

“They’re very, very effective, but not 100%, and as a higher proportion of the population is double vaccinated, it’s inevitable that those 10% of that very large number remain at risk, and therefore will be amongst the people who both catch the infection and end up in hospital.”

Meanwhile, most regions of England now have more coronavirus patients in hospital than at any point since mid-March.

Two regions – south-west England and the combined area of north-east England and Yorkshire – are back to levels last seen more than four months ago.

For England as a whole, there are now 3,813 patients in hospital with COVID-19 – the highest number since 24 March.

Sir Patrick also warned said there were “high levels of COVID and they are increasing”.

He said the UK was quite close to the previous “winter wave” of infections.

“In the winter wave, we were up to around 60,000 people testing positive per day,” he said.

“We are now somewhere on towards 50,000. So we’re quite close to the size of the winter wave of infections and this is going to increase.”

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