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UK warned to prepare for up to six waves of coronavirus over the next year
MPs have been warned.
A leading physician has warned that the UK needs to prepare for ‘further waves’ of coronavirus, adding that the government was ‘too slow’ when the crisis began.
Professor Anthony Costello told MPs on Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee that the country did not react quickly enough to the initial coronavirus warnings, Sky News reports.
Professor Costello, from University College London’s Institute for Global Health, and a former British director at the World Health Organisation, addressed MPs today.
He told the committee via video-link that Britain’s Covid-19 death rate will likely be higher than Italy and Spain, making us the worst hit in Europe.
Professor Costello said: “We all hope that the national lockdown and social distancing will bring about a large suppression of the epidemic; however, we are going to face further waves.
“We need to make sure we have a system in place that can not just do a certain number of tests in the laboratory.
“We also need a system at district and community level to test people rapidly in the community, in care homes, and make sure the results get back to them very quickly.
“We need to maintain social distancing of some kind when we lift the national lockdown, by focusing on the people we really want to lockdown, which are cases and contacts.
“You need to find cases, test them if you can, trace their contacts, isolate them, do social distancing – but most importantly of all you do it all at speed.”
The physician said that even when lockdown is starting to lift, the most vulnerable people would have to remain self-isolating until a vaccine is found – which might not be until spring 2021 at the earliest.
According to Professor Costello, the UK might face as many as six waves of the coronavirus before we get a vaccine.
He added: “We have to get the economy going and if it means locking down 10% of our population, even giving them incentives to stay in quarantine and with digital apps to help monitor their symptoms and give them support, that’s the way to really keep this going until we get a vaccine and safe herd immunity.”
Talking about the second wave, Professor Costello said: “We will probably have the highest death rate in Europe, we have to face the reality of that. We were too slow on a number of things, but we can make sure that in the second wave we’re not too slow.”