THERE was confusion last night after the UK Government and two of its top scientific advisers appeared to clash over the current the coronavirus transmission rates.
Professor John Edmunds, who heads the department of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the rate had risen in the past two weeks, in part down to the sheer number of people with the virus being transmitted in hospitals and care homes.
He told MPs that while lockdown had been successful in bringing down the rate of the R number, which measures how the disease spreads through the population, it had inched up in recent weeks.
“The most recent estimate is the R is between about 0.75 and one, so just below one,” Edmunds said.
“If you had asked me this question about two weeks ago I’d have given you lower numbers. I’d have said to you the reproduction number was about 0.6, 0.7, in that range, maybe up to 0.8.
“The lockdown has worked, breaking chains of transmission in the community. What we’re seeing is this continuing epidemic in hospitals and in care homes.”
Edmunds estimated the existing rate of prevalence at 20,000 cases a day, which, he said, would make it hard to bring in an effective track-and-trace system.
“We are having perhaps 20,000 cases a day, so being able to contact all of those people [for contact tracing] would be really impossible at the moment. So the incidence has to come right down for contact tracing to be feasible, really.”
At the Downing Street daily briefing, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the R rate was lower than it had been – between 0.5 and 0.9, the lowest Government estimate yet.
But national statistician Sir Ian Diamond told the same briefing he would “not demur” over Edmunds’s estimate.
Diamond said: “It’s probably gone up just a little bit from these last estimates and that is driven by the epidemic in care homes, he [Edmunds] would say, and I would not demur from that.
“It is a real challenge to reduce the epidemic in care homes.”
Diamond told the briefing that there was some variation in the R number around the country.
“The consensus is that it is below one everywhere, lowest probably in London. Certainly there is some variation across the different regions,” he said.
Unusually, Diamond gave a “personal view” on plans to ease social distancing measures.
Interjecting at the end of the briefing, he said: “All the data we are looking at shows the success of social distancing.
“And if I may give a personal view, then I do believe social distancing and maintaining it over the next few weeks is going to be central to continuing to reduce the epidemic.”
The latest figures show the total number of people who have died in the UK after testing positive for coronavirus is 30,615 – a daily increase of 539.
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