England risks COVID-19 resurgence by ending lockdown too soon, scientific advisers say

[rooster59]

England risks COVID-19 resurgence by ending lockdown too soon, scientific advisers say

By Kate Holton

 

A sign with instructions to parents and children is seen on the front gate at St. Joseph's Catholic Primary School as they prepare to reopen following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Hertford, Britain, May 29, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Couldridge

 

LONDON (Reuters) - England risks losing control of the coronavirus pandemic again and is at a "very dangerous moment" as it starts to ease out of the COVID-19 lockdown, senior scientific and medical advisers warned on Saturday.

 

One of the slowest countries to lock down, Britain is now one of the worst-hit and is just starting to take tentative steps to reopen parts of the economy, aided by a newly launched track and trace system that is designed to suppress outbreaks.

 

From Monday, up to six people will be able to meet outside their homes in England, some school classes will restart and elite competitive sport can resume without fans.

 

But four members of Britain's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) called the lifting premature, adding that the track and trace system was untested and unlikely to cope with an infection rate of around 8,000 new cases a day.

 

John Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a member of SAGE, said the easing was risky.

 

"Track and trace was only launched the day before yesterday, so we can't be sure that that is working effectively yet and yet we're going ahead and making these changes anyway," he told Sky News. "I think that that is rather dangerous."

 

Living with the infection rate at its current level, he said, would lead to many more cases and more deaths. Three other members of SAGE and the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, also expressed their concern.

 

In response, England's deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam agreed that the country was at a very dangerous moment and said the easing would only work if the track and trace system succeeded, and if people followed the rules.

 

Van-Tam said the more than 50 members of SAGE, which includes scientists, medics and academics, often held differing opinions but they all agreed that any easing must be painstakingly slow and extremely cautious.

 

"This gets out of control quite quickly if you allow it to, and it then takes many weeks to get the brakes on it," he said, adding that the track and trace system would take time to bed down and people must not "tear the pants out" of the new guidance.

 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government, which has been heavily criticised for its handling of the pandemic, said the slight relaxation of the rules would ease the burden of lockdown while keeping the virus' reproduction rate down.

 

Britain has recorded more than 270,000 cases of coronavirus and says more than 38,000 have died after testing positive for the illness. The Office of National Statistics and other sources of data put the figure of fatalities from suspected and confirmed cases at 48,000.

 

The government is now caught between the need to prevent a second wave and the need to reopen the economy and keep companies alive.

 

It says that while it may have made some mistakes it is grappling with the biggest public health crisis since the 1918 influenza outbreak and that it has prevented the health service from being overwhelmed.

 

SAGE member Peter Horby said the next three weeks would be crucial. "Returning to a situation where we've lost control again is far worse than a week or two (more) of social measures," he said.

 

(Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge, Helen Popper and Frances Kerry)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2020-05-31

 

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[Rookiescot]

Come on. We all know the easing of the lockdown rules was to try and get Cummings out of the front page headlines.

The track and trace system is not even working yet.

 

 

[Bkk Brian]

damned if you do, damned if you don't

[248900_1469958220]

and.....'Shalakazaam' just like magic  Covid 19 is old news.....

[Kadilo]

Having spent the past week in England since the Cummings debacle I can assure you there is no Lockdown. 
All this tosh about you can only have so many friends to bbq only in your garden, not allowed on your house etc etc utter nonsense and unmanageable. Johnson couldn't even keep tabs on his right hand man doing a 500 mile round trip, how the hell does he think they can count how many people are attending a bbq from a different home. 
The sun is shining, the beaches are full, the roads are no different from any other time, that’s the reality. 
All we are doing is paying people to go to the beach or parks rather than go back to work. Utter nonsense. Once you release any measures it becomes uncontrollable and once you condone a main player who clearly breached them forget any kind of buy in. 
All you are doing now is preventing people going back to work and harming the economy even more. Whatever happens re second spike is gonna happen regardless. Just get on with it. 
 

Edited May 31, 2020 by Kadilo

[RuamRudy]

41 minutes ago, Kadilo said:

Having spent the past week in England since the Cummings debacle I can assure you there is no Lockdown. 
All this tosh about you can only have so many friends to bbq only in your garden, not allowed on your house etc etc utter nonsense and unmanageable. Johnson couldn't even keep tabs on his right hand man doing a 500 mile round trip, how the hell does he think they can count how many people are attending a bbq from a different home. 
The sun is shining, the beaches are full, the roads are no different from any other time, that’s the reality. 
All we are doing is paying people to go to the beach or parks rather than go back to work. Utter nonsense. Once you release any measures it becomes uncontrollable and once you condone a main player who clearly breached them forget any kind of buy in. 
All you are doing now is preventing people going back to work and harming the economy even more. Whatever happens re second spike is gonna happen regardless. Just get on with it. 
 

I am in the north of Scotland where, in the main, people continue to follow regulations. There is an increase, however, of camper vans and tourists from elsewhere, and locals are starting to get very angry. Whether the SG will take action isn't clear as they don't seem to want to close the border, but there are many up here who want it closed to stop the second wave. 

[Kadilo]

1 minute ago, RuamRudy said:

I am in the north of Scotland where, in the main, people continue to follow regulations. There is an increase, however, of camper vans and tourists from elsewhere, and locals are starting to get very angry. Whether the SG will take action isn't clear as they don't seem to want to close the border, but there are many up here who want it closed to stop the second wave. 

I was in Scotland before I came back here and it was far better communicated, controlled and observed. Johnson’s latest knee jerk response to try and take attention away from the Cummings debacle and get public opinion back onside is unmanageable and in effect ending any Lockdown with the exception of punishing businesses more. 
 

I have no doubt there will be a second spike and it seems the scientists feel the same way but as Johnson proved the other day, they are gagged from speaking in public about anything he doesn’t want them to. 
 

 

[ukrules]

2 hours ago, Kadilo said:

I have no doubt there will be a second spike and it seems the scientists feel the same way but as Johnson proved the other day, they are gagged from speaking in public about anything he doesn’t want them to. 

I think you're going to be in for a bit of a surprise on the 'second wave' when all is said and done.

 

Edited May 31, 2020 by ukrules

[dunroaming]

3 hours ago, Kadilo said:

Having spent the past week in England since the Cummings debacle I can assure you there is no Lockdown. 
All this tosh about you can only have so many friends to bbq only in your garden, not allowed on your house etc etc utter nonsense and unmanageable. Johnson couldn't even keep tabs on his right hand man doing a 500 mile round trip, how the hell does he think they can count how many people are attending a bbq from a different home. 
The sun is shining, the beaches are full, the roads are no different from any other time, that’s the reality. 
All we are doing is paying people to go to the beach or parks rather than go back to work. Utter nonsense. Once you release any measures it becomes uncontrollable and once you condone a main player who clearly breached them forget any kind of buy in. 
All you are doing now is preventing people going back to work and harming the economy even more. Whatever happens re second spike is gonna happen regardless. Just get on with it. 
 

It is true that for the last week or so people are out and about much more.  My son (17) started out meeting up with a couple of friends and keeping his distance, more or less.  Then his girlfriend managed to sneak out and meet him in the local park and there was certainly no social distancing observed.  Last night he met up with a group of his friends and they went off and played football together.  On the other hand the distancing is still being observed at supermarkets and petrol stations and post offices etc.

 

Mid June the big stores are due to re-open and the any social distancing will be totally out of the window then.  The government, in hindsight, have stumbled along blindly with Johnson holding the white stick.  The Cummings farce was the trigger for many people to just call time on the restrictions and the warm weather made the temptation so much more appealing.

 

As for the schools re-opening, what a farce that is!  It is rapidly approaching the end of the school year so why send them back now? Surely they should work on starting again in September so that they can bring the curricular back on course.  It's just one stupid move after another.  No wonder most of the schools are refusing to go along with the madness.

 

Will there be a second wave?  Maybe.  My wife goes back to work on Monday with all the restrictions in place.  She is just thankful she has a job to go back to.  For hundreds of thousands that isn't going to be the case.

[bkk6060]

Just a few days ago the UK had the highest Covid death rate per capita in the world.

Why is this?

Smoking, obesity, general unhealthy lifestyles?  Or just very poor management by the government

with a careless goal to save lives?

Indeed, what a total terrible sad travesty it is.

 

Edited May 31, 2020 by bkk6060

[dunroaming]

Well plenty of unhealthy lifestyles all over Europe.  Ignorance and a government who have been shown to have got the response spectacularly wrong is most likely. 

[talahtnut]

Neil Morris Ferguson OBE FMedSci

is a British epidemiologist and professor

of mathematical biology, who specialises

in the patterns of spread of infectious

disease in humans and animals. Wikipedia. 

Well here we have the biggest scientific

cheese in the business, who predicted

2.000.000 deaths, turns out to be a big

scare story to make the us peasants easy

to starve. Recent data from Docs suggest

that not much different from Flu.

It all boils down to Never trust your government.

 

 

[Chiphigh]

I see that it is mostly the leftists that seem to want to keep the ridiculous lock down in perpetuity regardless of the cost to businesses and the loss of people's livelihood. They are the first to be mask nazis and the proverbial hall monitoring twits. Then they go back to the moral preening and shaming nonsense. 

[TheDark]

Sweden did experiment keeping the society open to gain country wide immunity without vaccination. They failed. 

 

If UK wishes to do the same, that's ok. Now that UK has left the EU, their people can be confined to stay in their own country for the time it takes to get through this pandemic. Some more people will die, but I guess that's ok to keep the owners happy.

[stevenl]

20 minutes ago, Chiphigh said:

I see that it is mostly the leftists that seem to want to keep the ridiculous lock down in perpetuity regardless of the cost to businesses and the loss of people's livelihood. They are the first to be mask nazis and the proverbial hall monitoring twits. Then they go back to the moral preening and shaming nonsense. 

You have any comments on what is happening in the UK,? I for one appreciate the information given by the people who are or were there, much more than a rant about leftists without factual content.

[tribalfusion001]

What is the problem it's a nice day for the park and the beach, shame the pubs are not open. If you are not in the high risk groups it's not much of a problem.

[talahtnut]

In a recent article published in the BMJ,

The British Medical Journal.  It stated:

“Only a third of the excess deaths seen

in the community in England and Wales

can be explained by Covid-19.

...David Spiegelhalter, chair of the

Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence

Communication at the University of

Cambridge, said that Covid-19 did not

explain the high number of deaths

taking place in the community.”

“At a briefing hosted by the Science

Media Centre on May 12 he explained

that, over the past five weeks, care

homes and other community settings

had had to deal with a ‘staggering burden’

of 30,000 more deaths than would

normally be expected, as patients were

moved out of hospitals that were

anticipating high demand for beds.

So it is, that vulnerable care homes were

seeded with positive covid patients.

[sawadee1947]

12 hours ago, rooster59 said:

losing control of the coronavirus pandemic

They never got control over this virus because the country stinks from it's head. However the head did not lose the control over his brain because he didn't get any so far. 

[evadgib]

1 hour ago, sawadee1947 said:

They never got control over this virus because the country stinks from it's head. However the head did not lose the control over his brain because he didn't get any so far. 

Has this escaped you, Seamus?

[sawadee1947]

53 minutes ago, evadgib said:

Has this escaped you, Seamus?

Now UK just tests 200.000 a week. 

That is not even half of tests in eg Germany. 

So I would count UK to the undeveloped contries for sure. 

And last... I think it was Churchill? who said: Adviser advice and PM decide. 

Well, even this changed because of inability to rule UK by Bojo. High time to dump him. 

[sawadee1947]

1 hour ago, evadgib said:

Has this escaped you, Seamus?

Adviser advise

[teacherofwoe]

23 hours ago, rooster59 said:

the more than 50 members of SAGE, which includes scientists, medics and academics, often held differing opinions

But we won't report that. 

[mommysboy]

18 hours ago, bkk6060 said:

Just a few days ago the UK had the highest Covid death rate per capita in the world.

Why is this?

Smoking, obesity, general unhealthy lifestyles?  Or just very poor management by the government

with a careless goal to save lives?

Indeed, what a total terrible sad travesty it is.

 

Accurate reporting of figures, maybe!

[Laughing Gravy]

16 hours ago, evadgib said:

Has this escaped you, Seamus?

He is just anti English who is angry about envious everything British.

Number 47 has still escaped him as so many other things.

[TeaMonkey]

Maybe the coronavirus has already mutated into a less dangerous strain and will disappear soon like SARS did. 

 

ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday.

 

“In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion. 

“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-virus/new-coronavirus-losing-potency-top-italian-doctor-says-idUSKBN2370OQ

 

[Bkk Brian]

15 hours ago, sawadee1947 said:

Now UK just tests 200.000 a week. 

That is not even half of tests in eg Germany. 

So I would count UK to the undeveloped contries for sure. 

And last... I think it was Churchill? who said: Adviser advice and PM decide. 

Well, even this changed because of inability to rule UK by Bojo. High time to dump him. 

Check your source, because the UK tests over 100,000 per day and has the capacity for 200,000 per day. 

[RuamRudy]

9 minutes ago, TeaMonkey said:

Maybe the coronavirus has already mutated into a less dangerous strain and will disappear soon like SARS did. 

 

ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday.

 

“In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion. 

“The swabs that were performed over the last 10 days showed a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago,” he told RAI television. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-virus/new-coronavirus-losing-potency-top-italian-doctor-says-idUSKBN2370OQ

 

But that would not reduce the potency of the existing virus nor, I presume, would it preclude the possibility of the existing virus mutating into another, more pernicious strain.

[stevenl]

1 minute ago, RuamRudy said:

But that would not reduce the potency of the existing virus nor, I presume, would it preclude the possibility of the existing virus mutating into another, more pernicious strain.

This is what happened to other corona viruses like flu and cold, they started off strong but soon were reduced to far less. The same expected to happen tom Covid-19.

[stevenl]

7 minutes ago, Bkk Brian said:

Check your source, because the UK tests over 100,000 per day and has the capacity for 200,000 per day. 

Maybe, maybe not.

 

From BBC: "The UK has exceeded its target to increase coronavirus testing capacity to 200,000 a day by the end of May." would support your claim, but 

"While capacity for testing is over 200,000, a little more than 115,000 tests were carried out in the 24 hours up to 09:00 BST on Sunday.

For several days, the government has been unable to give figures on the exact number of people who were tested." indicates one day 100k+, other days possibly/probably less; and

"The UK now has capacity for 40,000 antibody tests a day, the Department for Health and Social Care confirmed.

The tests, which determine whether someone has had the virus, are currently only available to health and care staff." indicates far less.

[473geo]

England leading from the front, there was always going to be a limit to length of the 'lock down' due to financial implications and adherence, what needed to be achieved by 'lock down' has been achieved.

No problem if those susceptible continue to exercise extreme caution, responsibility has shifted, now it falls on the individual, and, family groups, to assess their own situation and act accordingly.

Of course those that get it wrong will inevitably blame the government, those that remain unaffected will take credit for their 'brave' actions ????

 

Edited June 1, 2020 by 473geo