Britain enters new phase in coronavirus epidemic

The next phase of the UK’s response to the coronavirus is now underway, according to the British government’s Chief Medical Adviser. This means that the efforts to contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus have been unsuccessful, and mechanisms to delay the growth of further infections will now be put in place.

The news comes as the number of recorded cases in the UK increased to 90, including three new patients who tested positive for coronavirus in Scotland. COVID-19 is now at the point where it becomes endemic in the country and the transmission of the infection is taking place within communities in ways which are impossible to trace and contain.

Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Adviser and the Chief Medical Officer of Public Health England, has now said that the likelihood the virus will fade away has gone from “slim to zero.”

Speaking in the House of Commons Health Select Committee meeting this morning, Whitty was asked by the chair – former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt – whether the country has moved from stage one (Contain) to stage two (Delay) of the government’s official emergency plan to tackle the virus.

In response, Whitty said: “I would say we’ve moved from a situation in which we were mainly in Contain with some Delay built in… (to) we’re now mainly Delay, but we’re maintaining some of the elements (of Contain).”

When pressed further, Whitty confirmed: “We’re now mainly in the second stage” – that is, Delay.

But the government and its expert advisers have been sending mixed messages this morning about whether the UK has or has not, officially-speaking, moved from the Contain to the Delay phase of the epidemic.

Whitty’s remarks to MPs in the Health Select Committee differed to the remarks of the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock who, in a speech delivered to the British Chambers of Commerce , stated that the UK is still in the “Contain phase”.

“Contain, the phase we are currently in, means detecting the early cases, tracing their close contacts, and preventing the disease from taking hold in the UK for as long as is reasonably possible”, Hancock said.

He added: “This approach has bought time for the NHS to ramp up its preparations. But the scientific advice is that we may not be able to contain the virus forever, especially if the number of cases continues to rise in Europe.”

“At that point, on the advice of the Chief Medical Officer, we’ll activate the next phase of our plan, which is to delay.”

It seems that Whitty, who is the country’s most senior medical adviser, has already decided that the time has come to trigger the delaying mechanisms.

Whitty spoke this morning of the inevitability of “community transmission” now taking place. This means that the spread of infection is now likely to be going on among the everyday lives of the public without most people realising. It will be taking place within public places, schools and homes.

This does not mean, however, that the government’s Delay measures will become noticeable straight away. Although Downing Street has temporary, and extraordinary, legal powers to act in a forceful and draconian way to curb the spread of infection, the Prime Minister and his advisers want to make sure that they do not act prematurely and create undue panic.

The Prime Minister, who appeared on ITV’s This Morning programme today, said that his government would be seeking to “strike a balance” between draconian measures and allowing people to go about “business as usual”.

He explained that the government’s emergency scientific advisory group, SAGE, had concluded that closing schools and stopping big public events are, counter-intuitively, “don’t work as well perhaps as people think in stopping the spread.”

This echoed the advice given by Whitty this morning, who said schools should not be closing – yet – and that any “fundamental decision” to implement a lockdown on public places would come at a later stage in the epidemic.

The results of such quarantines and lockdowns in Italy, the government’s advisers suggest, has not brought as much success in tackling the spread of coronavirus as had been anticipated by local authorities.

In an effort to combat any popular alarmism surrounding the outbreak, Whitty was adamant that there is “no need” for members of the public to stockpile on goods, food, or medicines. The government has said that it has already acted to stockpile essential medicines and protective equipment to take into consider potential disruption to global supply chains.

Whitty also told MPs this morning that people should not seek to self-isolate yet. “Self-isolating over this period…inevitably involves some social isolation, for some months, and that would not be a good thing in our view societally.”

The Chief Medical Officer also sought to reassure elderly Britons that they should not allow the virus to stop them going about their daily lives. He said that even in the very stressed health service of Hubei in China the great majority of those who caught this virus survived it. That is the great majority,  over 90%.

“I think it’s easy to get a perception that if you’re older and you get this virus then you’re a goner – absolutely not. The great majority of people will recover from this virus, even if they are in their eighties.”

The World Health Organisation announced yesterday that the fatality rate from the virus worldwide stands at 3.4%. The rate for seasonal flu is 0.1%.

However, public health experts have said that the death rate is likely to be lower than this in reality, and that it will most probably be revised down at a later date, as more mild cases are detected. Because the official WHO data cannot take account of people who have been infected without displaying symptoms, the rate likely becomes skewed to suggest a higher fatality rate than there actually is.