England easing COVID-19 lockdown too early, scientific advisers warn
England risks losing control of the coronavirus pandemic again since it is starting to lift its lockdown without a fully operational track and trace program set up, three senior scientific advisers warned on Saturday.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said England's lockdown measures will be eased cautiously from Monday, aided by a track and trace system that launched on Thursday. The advisers warned, however, that the system was not yet in full procedure and risked being overwhelmed by the around 8,000 new infections that remain occurring every day beyond hospitals and care homes. John Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and an associate of Britain's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), said the federal government was going for a risk.
"Track and trace was only launched your day before yesterday, so we can't be sure that that's working effectively yet and yet we're going ahead and making these changes anyway," he told Sky News. "I feel that that's rather dangerous." Edmunds' comments were echoed by two other SAGE members: Peter Horby, also the chairman of the brand new and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG), and Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Welcome Trust.
Among the slowest countries to lock down, Britain is currently among the worst-hit by the pandemic, with more than 48,000 deaths and more than 270,000 persons testing positive. To attempt to support the virus while also allowing the economy to recover, the test and trace system will ask contacts of men and women who test positive to self-isolate for two weeks, even if they haven't any symptoms. An app isn't yet ready for the scheme.
Horby of the University of Oxford said there is still an excessive amount of uncertainty in what would happen to the virus' reproduction rate - often called R - if schools reopen and alternative activities resume.
He added that the track, trace and isolate system had not been likely to be fully operational - with local teams attempting to stamp out clusters of cases - until the end of June. "Returning to a predicament where we've lost control again is far worse when compared to a week or two of social measures," he told BBC Radio.
Government officials have repeatedly said they are following "the science" because they respond to the pandemic, but Edmunds said your choice to help ease the lockdown from Monday was political. "My frustration has been at least that they are pretending that they're not making the decision, that actually it's us who are choosing, and that's not really the case," he said. "They have to make the decision and obviously they have."
The prime minister's office said it had always been informed by the info and evidence. "This package of measures has been carefully designed so we are able to ease the burdens of lockdown while looking to keep R below one." The devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are in charge of their own public health policy.
