Boris Johnson’s chief adviser on the coronavirus has warned that Britain might still have to adopt the contoversial herd immunity policy to defeat the pandemic.
Professor Graham Medley, the government’s chief pandemic modeller, said lockdown measures have pushed the UK ‘into a corner’, with no way of lifting restrictions while keeping the virus under control.
Now, he has suggested that the country consider letting people catch coronavirus to build up resistance.
The alternative, under current lockdown measures, means the UK could be left facing mounting unemployment, domestic violence and mental ill health.
He has described it as a trade-off between harming the young versus the old.
Professor Graham Medley, the government’s chief pandemic modeller, says Britain may still need to adopt herd immunity
Early on as the outbreak began to take hold, it was suggested that one way of beating the virus was by allowing 80 per cent of Britons to get infected to build ‘herd immunity’.
Herd immunity is when enough people become resistant to a disease – through vaccination or previous exposure – that it can no longer significantly spread among the rest of the population.
However, the plan would have risked leaving the most vulnerable at high risk of death and serious illness and was quickly ruled out by Health Secretary Matt Hancock.
But Prof Medley is now warning that the controversial method may be the only solution.
Under his modelling, simply allowing people back to work or school would cause a resurgence in cases of the virus.
He said an anti-body test, which shows whether a person has had the virus and could therefor be immune, could help, but that one had never before been used in the management of such an outbreak.
Under his modelling, simply allowing people back to work or school after the lockdown would cause a resurgence in cases of the virus
A professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, he said: ‘This disease is so nasty that we had to suppress it completely.
‘Then we’ve kind of painted ourselves into a corner, because then the question will be what do we do now?’
He said there was a ‘big decision’ to be made on April 13, when the government reviews the lockdown measures.
‘In broad terms are we going to continue to harm children to protect vulnerable people, or not?’ he said.
Prof Medley, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), added: ‘The measures to control [the disease] cause harm.
‘The principal one is economic, and I don’t mean to the economy generally, I mean to the incomes of people who rely on a continuous stream of money and their children, particularly the school closure aspect.’
He said there will be ‘actual harms’ in terms of mental health, domestic violence, child abuse and food poverty.
Lockdown ‘buys more time’ but ‘doesn’t resolve anything’, he said.
Ministers have reportedly not yet been briefed on work to quantify the health impacts of the lockdown.
It comes as the UK announced 684 more coronavirus deaths yesterday, taking the total number of fatalities to 3,605.
Yet again the number is a record one-day high – this has been the case almost every day this week, with each day since Tuesday announcing more victims than the last.
The new numbers mean the number of people dead from COVID-19 in the UK has risen five-fold in a week, from just 759 last Friday, March 27.
The numbers behind the UK’s crisis have escalated rapidly over the past seven days and Health Secretary Matt Hancock today said the virus ‘continues its grim march’. He admitted that next week is likely to be worse still, potentially topping out at more than 1,000 deaths per day by Easter Sunday.
Britain is still being hammered by the consequences of huge numbers of people catching the coronavirus before the country went into total lockdown last week. The increases being seen each day are ‘expected’, scientists say.
Experts say it could take another couple of weeks before the benefits of social distancing start to show in NHS statistics – but they insist that the outbreak will taper off and the daily numbers will start to fall.
The Government today penned an open letter pleading for firms who can make PPE and coronavirus tests to come forward (pictured, one of the forms)
Matt Hancock and the chief nursing officer, Ruth May, said in today’s briefing that people must resist the urge to break isolation and go out this weekend, when sunny weather is expected. Mr Hancock said: ‘We cannot relax our discipline now. If we do, people will die. This advice is not a request – it is an instruction.’
The Government yesterday also penned an open letter pleading for firms who can make personal protective equipment (PPE) and coronavirus tests to come forward – despite firms who offered help weeks ago saying they still have not heard back about helping tackle Britain’s growing crisis.
In a desperate attempt to get a grip of the testing fiasco and nationwide shortage of protective equipment for NHS staff, the Department for Health and Social Care supplied two forms for British manufacturers to fill out if they could step up to help.
But MailOnline can reveal one firm poised to supply DIY coronavirus antibody tests to Number 10 – kits deemed crucial in ending Britain’s draconian lockdown because they reveal who is immune to the disease – has yet to hear back on how it can get its test approved despite approaching them last month.
Brigette Bard, chief executive of Essex-based firm BioSure – which already makes HIV self-tests, demanded Public Health England offers clarity on what it needs, saying ‘there is nothing more critical at the moment’ than getting antibody tests approved.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock, pictured at the opening of the Nightingale Hospital in London today, suggested the UK’s lockdown will be in place until the end of April at the earliest
She added in a video that PHE were not looking at her company’s test because it was a self-test – claims which a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson furiously refuted, branding Ms Bard’s words as ‘untrue and misleading’.
Commercial laboratories and scientists drafted in to help yesterday after a screeching U-turn by ministers also exposed Downing Street’s incompetence today, claiming they had offered two weeks ago to help the Government dramatically scale-up its swab testing capacity but were ignored.
One man running a fully-equipped lab in Leicester revealed his firm had offered to help the Government but was now testing private clients on its own.
He said: ‘We approached the NHS on March 17 to offer our assistance and said we were happy to use all our capacity for NHS work and we’ve been trying to get a response since then.’
Scientists at the University of Oxford, one of the world’s top institutions, said they also had not had their offers of help taken up by British authorities.
Matthew Freeman, a biologist at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University said in a tweet: ‘We have many people experienced in PCR.
‘We’d love to help and have been trying to volunteer for weeks. Must be many university departments and institutes in similar position.’