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The lockdown measures currently in place in England are likely to reduce the R number of the coronavirus below one.
But government scientists say that returning to the previous tiered system after December 2 will cause infections to rise to levels seen in early November.
In a set of new documents released by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) on Friday, experts said that if the four-week lockdown measures are well adhered to, the number of hospital admissions and deaths can be expected to decline to as low as at least the second week of December.
But they added that a longer-term outlook will depend as much on the nature of the non-pharmaceutical interventions implemented after December 2, when the lockdown measures are expected to be lifted, and on policies during the holiday period.
A document, dated November 4, said: “If England returns to the same application of the tier system before November 5, the transmission will return at the same rate of increase as today.”
(Image: PA)
On October 12, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that England would be placed at “medium”, “high” and “very high” alert levels, or Level 1, 2 and 3, which imply various restrictions aimed at fighting the virus.
But as the number of coronavirus infections continued to rise, a four-week lockdown was introduced on November 5.
Currently, the number of new daily cases in the UK is believed to be between 55,000 and 81,000.
Experts believe that R, which represents the number of people infected by a Covid-19 positive person, is below one in some places, particularly in the North West of England.
Meanwhile, another document from Sage suggests that the national outbreak is still in a “high and controlled” phase.
If this continues to be the case, or if the outbreak returns to current levels after the shutdown, Sage has cautioned that there is “little to no scope to relax social distancing rules over Christmas.”
But if the prevalence is “low and controlled” and R is “well below one” for some time, experts say there may be a “greater potential to relax the rules of social distancing for a limited period of time during the period. festive”.
(Image: Andrew Teebay / Liverpool Echo)
(Image: PA)
Government scientists said that if R is lowered to 1.1 or less for some time, there may be a “limited build-up of population immunity.”
This, they say, will begin to reduce the average population’s susceptibility to the virus and slow down transmission.
Sage said: “When R is 1.1, only 9% of the remaining susceptible population (ie not previously infected) needs to be infected for R to drop to one, solely as a result of the natural dynamics of the epidemic.
“At this point, in a sense, the immunity of the population has caused the epidemic to stabilize.”
However, they added that population immunity is “very different from a classic ‘group immunity’ scenario, where an epidemic has passed through a population with limited impact from control measures.”
Experts said that in a population immunity scenario, “there will be very limited space to relax interventions, as the absolute level of population immunity will likely remain low.”
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