THE UK Government appears “content” with a certain number of Covid-19 infections and deaths every day, according to public health expert professor Devi Sridhar.
The professor, who has been advising the Scottish Government on its response to the coronavirus crisis, called on Westminster to “clearly articulate” its virus strategy during an interview with Channel 4 News last night.
Sridhar, the chair of global public health at Edinburgh University, told the programme she feels “quite lucky” to be in Scotland where the level of Covid-19 is currently low.
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She has been vocal about how countries should aim for a zero-Covid strategy in order to get back to some form of normality after lockdown. The professor has previously said for Scotland to achieve that, it will require co-operation with England.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked Sridhar: “When it comes to infections and deaths, is Scotland doing better than the rest of the United Kingdom, or better than England proportionally?”
Sridhar replied: “I guess I would compare Scotland to the rest of the world. I’d say right now I feel quite lucky to be here, because our testing positivity, that’s the number of positive cases of the total number of people you test, is very low – it’s under 1%, under, today, 0.5%. Many places in the world are on 10-20%.
"With England... it seems like they are trying to suppress but they're also content with a certain number of infections every day and a certain level of death."
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) July 23, 2020
Professor Devi Sridhar from the University of Edinburgh compares England's approach to Covid-19 to that of Scotland. pic.twitter.com/IILRcAddEf
“Deaths, we’ve had 15 days with one death, one person in ICU. So of course with pandemics before you can never celebrate, you just have to hope to maintain and hope to keep that ground, but I think it feels in a good place right now.”
The journalist then asked Sridhar about the zero-Covid strategy she has pushed forward in recent months.
Sridhar told him: “I think here it’s been clearly communicated we want to get out of community transmission, when you’re out of community transmission you can have people who are shielding go outside, you can actually have schools reopen fully with no distancing, you can have contact sports go ahead because you don’t have that fear of the virus lingering everywhere.
“You have clusters that might emerge but you can quickly detect them and contact trace, you can get out of that. With England, I’m not really sure. It seems they are trying to suppress but they’re also content with a certain number of infections every day and a certain level of death. So I just wish they would clearly articulate it and we could work together across the four nations to really drive this virus out.”
Scotland recorded 16 new coronavirus cases yesterday, and no new deaths for a week running.
Sridhar has previously said Scotland could eliminate Covid-19 within “weeks” – but that this would not be possible for England, where the prevalence of the virus is higher.
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