One of the UK’s top disease experts has suggested the government should “maybe pause at the headlong rush to get everybody back into offices” in England, as a minister admitted there was not yet a certified on-the-spot Covid test available.
Prof Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, warned there had been an “uptick” in Covid-related hospital admissions in the UK in recent days, with infections increasing across all areas.
He said it was still too soon to know if reopening England’s schools last week had contributed to a significant spread of the disease. If it had, there might be a case to “reduce contacts in other settings”, he told Radio 4’s Today programme.
“I’m still working from home, many people I know are still working from home and I think we should hesitate and maybe pause at the headlong rush to get everybody back into offices. But some people have to [go to] work and I completely understand the concerns in many quarters that everybody working at home has an economic impact, particularly on city centres,” he said.
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said the government had pinned its hopes on the development of an on-the-spot test that could produce results in “20 or 90 minutes”, without being sent to a lab. But he admitted it was as yet unproven, which is why Boris Johnson had billed it a “moonshot”.
“This technology, to be perfectly blunt, requires further development. There isn’t a certified test in the world, though people are working on prototypes of this sort of thing. So it’s not immediate but it is something that we want to develop,” he told Sky News.
“We want to do what we are calling a moonshot. In other words, we know it is difficult and isn’t simple to achieve, but we hope that it will be possible through new technology and new tests to have a test which works by not having to return the sample to a lab, that it can work in-line and in a much shorter period of time. The prime minister has talked of 20 minutes or 90 minutes,” Shapps said.
“Of course the absolute panacea would be to have a vaccine,” he added. On Wednesday the Oxford vaccine trial was put on hold due to a possible adverse reaction in a trial participant.
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On the new restrictions, which mean from Monday people in England will not be allowed to gather in groups of more than six, Shapps rejected the suggestion that young people should be exempt, despite the fact that very few of them die or need hospital care after getting Covid.
“Though unlikely to die, [young people] can be ill for a very long time – we have a lot of evidence that young people can suffer from coronavirus for months. It can be quite debilitating,” said Shapps, adding: “I think it would be quite wrong as a society to let this virus run rampant in part of society and everyone else has to run away and hide like hermits. That’s not a way to run a society.”
Ferguson warned that the virus was now spreading across the country again, “not just in hotspots”, and was affecting all age groups.
“I should say in the last week we have seen a rise across the country, not just in hotspots. We are starting to now see now an uptick in hospitalisations. The data is early and all the analysis both we have been doing and other groups across the country suggests we will see an uptick in coming weeks. So now is the time to respond to get on top of that,” he said.
It will take two or three weeks to see if the new “rule of six” brings down infections, Ferguson told the BBC: “The measures just announced will take some weeks to take effect so we will have to see how much we manage to flatten the curve and if that’s not sufficient to reduce the reproduction number below 1 then yes, we may need to clamp down in other areas.”
source https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/10/neil-ferguson-expert-questions-drive-to-get-people-back-into-offices-in-england
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