Johnson admits the UK was unprepared for the coronavirus crisis
“We didn’t learn the lesson on SARS and MERS,” UK prime minister Boris Johnson said today as he faced questions from the House of Commons Liaison Committee, referencing the government’s pandemic planning and a lack of capacity at Public Health England to detect outbreaks of coronavirus around the country. He also said that there would not be an official inquiry to investigate whether his senior aide Dominic Cummings broke lockdown rules. More than 40 Conservative party MPs have now called for Cummings’ resignation.
During the meeting, Johnson announced that England’s test and trace system will be launched tomorrow. Under the new system, contact tracers will ask people who test positive for coronavirus to self-isolate for 14 days, regardless of symptoms, and to provide details of any recent close contacts. The secretary of state will have the power to “mandate” people to isolate if they do not isolate voluntarily. The government announced earlier today that localised lockdowns, including targeted closures of schools and workplaces, could be used to control outbreaks in areas of England that see increases in confirmed coronavirus cases.
The UK could reduce the number of new coronavirus infections passed on by each person, lessening the spread by 5 to 15 per cent, if the country implemented targeted contact tracing. This is the finding of a report published today by Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE), a data analytics group at the Royal Society in the UK. DELVE modelled the spread of coronavirus in the UK, taking into account how people interact with each other in various settings, including households, workplaces and schools.
Their report says a test and trace type scheme could be an important part of an overall strategy to contain the epidemic, particularly if the country’s R number is around 1. Almost all countries that have managed to control their covid-19 epidemics have enacted and maintained substantial testing and contact tracing efforts from early on in their epidemics, according to DELVE committee chair Venki Ramakrishnan.
Other coronavirus developments
The Americas are now the epicentre of the pandemic, according to the World Health Organization director for the Americas, Carissa Etienne. “Latin America has passed Europe and the United States in daily infections,” she said, adding that “now is not the time for countries to ease restrictions.” There are more than 2.4 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the region and more than 143,000 deaths, including more than 24,000 in Brazil alone.
A Human Rights Watch report published yesterday suggests Venezuela’s covid-19 death toll is likely to be much higher than the most recently reported figure of 11 deaths, due to limited availability of reliable testing. Venezuela has confirmed more than 1200 cases so far.
More than 6.5 million people in Wuhan, China, about 80 per cent of the city’s population, have been tested for coronavirus in just 9 days, according to Chinese state media. Authorities say the testing is necessary to prevent a second wave of infections, though Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, told the New York Times that testing 100,000 people would have been sufficient.
New Zealand discharged its last coronavirus patient from hospital and hasn’t confirmed any new cases for five days in a row, said Ashley Bloomfield, the country’s director general of health, during a press conference today. He said there are currently 21 active coronavirus cases in New Zealand.
The worldwide death toll has passed 351,000. The number of confirmed cases is more than 5.6 million, according to the map and dashboard from Johns Hopkins University, though the true number of cases will be much higher.
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