Boris battleplan for Coronavirus lockdown

The public should be ready for a sustained “lockdown” lasting up to a month, Boris Johnson made clear today.

The Prime Minister was unveiling a detailed 28-page battle plan for tackling the Coronavirus as it spreads in the UK. The document was published online this morning at 10:30 am, as the Prime Minister delivered a press conference outlining the government’s strategy in the coming weeks and months.

Boris Johnson – flanked by the government’s Chief Medical Adviser and Chief Scientific Adviser – continued to echo advice given by leading health professionals in the previous week and outlined the main points of the contingency plans being put in place. For now, washing your hands for twenty seconds or more with hot water, or for as long as it takes to sing the national anthem, is still the best way to go about preventing the spread of infection. It is also important “at this stage”, to continue “going about our business as usual.”

The plan outlines the government’s response in the event of what Downing Street is calling a “severe prolonged pandemic”. Johnson said it will be “based upon the advice of our world leading scientific experts”. The government is anxious to convey that this will be an evidence-based response grounded in the data crunching and modelling led by the UK’s medical research professionals.

Johnson was eager to convey that the present plan does not set out what the government will do, but what the government can do if it becomes necessary. It lays out the contingencies which can be put in place in the event of the worst conceivable outcome. In reality, the virus will probably have a less severe impact.

There are “four essential” components to the response being prepared by Downing Street – “Contain”, “Delay, “Research, and “Mitigate”. The UK is currently in the “Contain phase”, in which the government will be seeking to prevent the spread of the virus and conduct research into a vaccine.

The Delay phase will be triggered when it becomes clear that containment strategies are no longer able to prevent the spread of the virus.

At this point, the government’s plan explains, “action that would be considered could include population distancing strategies”. This means that “school closures, encouraging greater home working, reducing the number of large scale gatherings” could all be put in place in order “to slow the spread of the disease throughout the population”.

This will be the largest scale global health scare managed by a British government since the swine flu (H1N1) pandemic of 2009. This time, both scale of the likely pandemic and the difficulty in providing a quick and effective vaccine treatment are likely to be greater.

In 2009, Gordon Brown’s government established a UK-wide coordinated containment strategy and acted swiftly to roll out antiviral medicines to vulnerable groups as well as those who had come into contact with the virus.

According to the official independent report on swine flu which was chaired by Dame Hine and published 2010, the outbreak cost about 457 lives between April 2009 and March 2010. The UK government also spent a total of £1.2 billion preparing for and responding to the crisis.

Boris Johnson’s government has announced so far that £40 million will be spent on research to develop vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics for COVID-19 as quickly as possible. More is likely to follow.

The government’s Chief Medical Adviser, Chris Whitty, and the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, explained the logic behind the government’s Delay strategy at the press conference today.

Vallance said: “There are a number of measures that can be taken to reduce the peak and flatten it a bit so that we haven’t got such a sharp number of people at any one time” he said. He added that: “the question is at what time to implement the measures”.

Acting too soon or too late will “end up with a lot of people having disruption, a lot of societal disruption, at a time (you’re) not getting benefits. Whereas what we really want to do is implement whatever’s necessary…at the right time, over a twelve week period.”

Whitty explained that one of “the key principles of the delay strategy” is to try and push back the timing of the peak of the infection in the UK. This will mean that the number of those infected is at its greatest during a time when the NHS is better able to handle it, in the Spring and the Summer months rather than in the winter when the country’s hospitals are already under strain.

Once the zenith of the health crisis is reached, it is also possible – according to the government’s data modelling – that as much as a fifth of the working population could be absent in the peak weeks of an endemic. The peak – the point at which the most people are infected with the virus – is predicted to last for a period lasting four weeks.

Public services will be probably be affected, meaning that essential services such as the NHS and the Police will have to prioritise core services. Non-urgent NHS care will be delayed, and police will have to focus on serious crime. The plan has also confirmed that, if it is necessary, it will draft in the army to fill in gaps in vital public services and help maintain public order.

The Prime Minister sought to reiterate today that the government’s emergency powers “are exceptional and short term” and “will not outlive” the coronavirus crisis.

The number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK has risen, at the time of writing, to 51 out of 7,000 people who have been tested. In the House of Commons earlier, the Health Secretary,Matt Hancock, warned that: “If the number of global cases continues to rise, especially in Europe, the scientific advice is that we may not be able to contain the virus indefinitely”.

Whitty has revealed that, based upon available data coming from Wuhan in China, “probably around 1% of people who get this virus” in the UK “might end up dying.”

To put this into perspective, research by the World Health Organisation and Imperial College London, published in 2013, has found that the 2009 swine flu pandemic had a death rate of 0.02%.

But the fatality rate for coronavirus could also be lower than models imply, Vallance suggested, because the data is based upon recorded cases of people with symptoms. There is a possibility that many have been infected without displaying symptoms.

The World Health Organisation’s latest figures reveal that there are now (at the time of writing), 92,311 recorded cases of Coronavirus worldwide. Of these, 48,457 have made a full recovery, and 3,137 have died.