Britons urged to stay at home despite warm weekend weather
Britons have been urged not to let this weekend’s warm weather coax them out of their homes, to reduce the spread of coronavirus, as a leading government adviser said the UK had “painted itself into a corner” with no clear exit strategy from the outbreak.
With swaths of the UK forecast to enjoy sunshine on Saturday and Sunday, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the health secretary, Matt Hancock, have said the public must resist the urge to flout physical distancing rules.
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Their reminder came as Prof Graham Medley, a pandemic modeller advising the government, said a prolonged lockdown risked causing more harm than the virus itself.
“This disease is so nasty that we had to suppress it completely,” he told the Times. “Then we’ve kind of painted ourselves into a corner, because then the question will be, what do we do now?
“We will have done three weeks of this lockdown, so there’s a big decision coming up on 13 April. In broad terms are we going to continue to harm children to protect vulnerable people, or not?”
Medley, a professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reportedly told the Times that Britain must consider allowing people to catch the virus in the least deadly way possible.
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His modelling showed that reopening schools and allowing people to return to work would let the pandemic take off again and that no way of easing the lockdown while controlling the virus had yet been found.
He also noted the impacts of lockdown measures on people’s income and mental health, children’s education and levels of domestic violence, child abuse and food poverty.
“If we carry on with lockdown it buys us more time, we can get more thought put into it, but it doesn’t resolve anything. It’s a placeholder,” he said.
Neil Ferguson, a leading professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, said on Saturday that Britain would not be able to relax its stringent lockdown rules until May.
“We want to move to a situation where at least by the end of May that we’re able to substitute some less intensive measures, more based on technology and testing, for the complete lockdown we have now,” he told Radio 4’s Today programme.
“There is a great deal of work under way to look at how we can substitute some of the very intense social distancing currently in place with a regime more based on intensive testing, very rapid access to testing, contact tracing of contracts. But in order to substitute that regime for what we’re doing now, we need to get case numbers down.”
The government has put Britain into a widespread lockdown, closing pubs, restaurants and nearly all shops. It has also banned social gatherings and ordered people to stay at home unless it is absolutely essential to go out.
Britain’s death toll from the global pandemic rose to 3,605 on Friday, among 38,168 people who have tested positive for Covid-19.
