[ad_1]
Tens of thousands of deaths are now unavoidable in a second wave of coronavirus infections spreading across England due to a lack of virus control, a government scientific adviser warned.
John Edmunds, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told MPs on Wednesday that without further action, England’s staggered Covid-19 strategy would lead to large numbers of new infections every day, putting the NHS under pressure and causing death. Toll.
“If you look at where we are, there’s no way we’re going to get out of this wave now without counting our deaths in the tens of thousands,” said Edmunds, an epidemiologist, at the joint hearing of the Commons science and technology committee and the Commons committee. health and social assistance.
He added: “We are already at the point, or approaching the point, where the health service will be under pressure in the coming weeks. And even if we stop things now, cases and hospitalizations will continue to increase for the next 10 days, two weeks, because they are already integrated into the system. “
Edmunds, who sits on the government’s Sage (advisory) committee, warned that if nothing else was done, the virus would peak in north-west England in the next four to six weeks; and the rest of the country would face “a very serious number of cases” at Christmas and New Years.
Since Prime Minister Boris Johnson acknowledged the second wave of coronavirus infections, on September 18, the government’s Covid-19 dashboard recorded 2,191 deaths in the UK and 1,903 in England.
The hearing, the second in an investigation focusing on lessons to be learned from the pandemic, highlighted the failure of the UK’s test and trace system to control the epidemic by containing outbreaks from the start.
Max Roser, a physician and director of the Oxford Martin program on global development, told the committee that several countries in Asia had recorded fewer than 10 deaths per million people, compared to 644 deaths per million in the UK.
One aspect that stood out as important, Roser said, was the ability to test people and scale up testing when outbreaks called for it. “In fact, only when people know that they are ill can they isolate themselves,” he told deputies.
David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said countries that were now opening successfully were able to do so because they had started tracing contacts early and could stop outbreaks. “You cannot do contact tracing from a central point, it must be done with the full participation of the communities,” he said.
Public Health England abandoned its routine monitoring and testing strategy in mid-March, ahead of the spring lockout, because it was unable to keep up with the outbreak.
In a contentious exchange, Jeremy Hunt, chairman of Commons’ health and social care committee, asked Edmunds about the government’s decision in March to move from containing the virus to mitigating the impact of the outbreak. He asked why the Sage scientists hadn’t been modeling and then proposed test and trace as a strategy. Edmunds said it had been modeled, but that, in March, England had too many cases to test and track.
When asked about local three-tier government Covid alert levels, Edmunds said it was not a strategy he would follow. Restrictions at level 3 could, at best, bring the R-value (the average number of infections caused by someone infected with Sars-CoV-2) closer to 1, he said, but that meant regions that were placed in the top tier when their cases skyrocketed would continue to have high levels of new infections, increased pressure on hospitals and high death rates.
“What that means is that we all end up at a high level of incidence where hospitals are really overloaded and we have a large number of deaths. That for me is the logical conclusion of the strategy we are following, and I would not follow that strategy, ”he said.
Edmunds argued that if the regions imposed a strict two-week circuit breaker first, they could potentially cut the rate of new infections in half and keep cases lower where the NHS was under less strain. Alternatively, he said, the whole country could go to level 3 to prevent places with low levels of infection from reaching the situation in Liverpool now and elsewhere in northern England.
In a news conference Tuesday, Johnson referred to charts showing infection rates declining for people ages 10-29 in many regions, but continuing to rise for older people. Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s professor and deputy chief medical officer, said the apparent decline could be due to the rate at which people came for tests.
