UK Covid restrictions may be too lax, health experts warn

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Chris Whitty urges people to stay home in new Covid campaign – video

The current national lockdown restrictions could be too “lax” to curb rocketing infections, say experts, and police will focus on enforcing the rules rather than on explaining them, government sources said.

New infections and deaths in the UK reached record highs on Friday.

A government advertising campaign fronted by the UK’s chief medical adviser, Prof Chris Whitty, urges people to behave as if they have Covid-19 and “once more, stay home”, as hospitals across the country are getting close to capacity, particularly in London and the south-east, where in some areas as many as one in 20 people have the virus and the mayor, Sadiq Khan, has declared a state of emergency.

Boris Johnson described the latest surge in infections as “alarming”.

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Prof Susan Michie, a health psychologist who advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), told the BBC Today programme that there had been 90% compliance with the third lockdown, but that government guidance was still enabling too much mixing on public transport and busier streets.

“This is quite a lax lockdown. Because we’ve still got a lot of household contact, people go in and out of each other’s houses, if you’re a cleaner, a non-essential tradesperson, a nanny; you have mass gatherings in terms of religious events, nurseries being open,” Michie said.

Adam Kucharski, an associate professor of infectious disease and epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said cases would continue to rise in the coming weeks. “I think the key period is going to be the next week or so. Even if we get that reproduction number down to 1, if we get the epidemic flat, that’s an epidemic that’s going to be plateauing at this really high level of hospitalisations.”

He said data suggested there was more movement in the population than during the first peak in April, despite each social interaction now being much riskier than in the spring.

“To some extent, we can think of this as a new pandemic in a pandemic. New data is suggesting that the risk from every contact is probably 40-50% higher than it was.

“So both for the UK and for many other countries as well, we need to get away from this idea that we’re going to see a repeat of what happened last spring with our behaviours and really face the possibility that this is much riskier and we’re going to have to work much harder to reduce the impact.”