By Penny Sarchet
Peter MacDiarmid/Shutterstock
Declines in hospital admissions, the number of people in intensive care and deaths in the UK all indicate that the restrictions brought in on 23 March to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the country have helped.
Plans to partially reopen schools and some shops as early as 1 June are being pursued in England, while in Scotland, some restrictions are expected to ease from 28 May. Some restrictions have also been removed in Wales and Northern Ireland in recent weeks. With thousands of new cases still being confirmed in the UK, extensive testing and contact tracing will be needed to prevent a second wave of infection.
According to the latest provisional data published by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), 41,220 deaths involving covid-19 had been registered in England and Wales by 15 May. In the UK, more than a quarter of deaths in the seven-day period ending 15 May involved the disease.
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As of 26 May, the Johns Hopkins University covid-19 dashboard placed the UK as home to the second-highest number of confirmed covid-19 deaths, behind the US. The UK also had the fourth-highest total of confirmed covid-19 cases, behind the US, Brazil and Russia.
The UK faces a particular challenge in easing its restrictions because, even though the number of new cases is in decline, it remains high. France, for example, reported 115 new coronavirus cases on 24 May, while nine were reported in Australia on 25 May. In the UK, 1625 new cases were reported on 25 May. The ONS estimates that 61,000 new infections a week occurred in England between 4 and 17 May.
“Lockdown is being released very gradually, as has been the case in many other countries,” says Linda Bauld, a public health specialist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “Most of the changes at the moment involve more activity outdoors, where the risk of transmission is low and therefore we wouldn’t expect this to result in a rapid rise in cases if social distancing is maintained.”
But the scandal surrounding Dominic Cummings, the prime ministerial aide who drove more than 400 kilometres from his London home with his son and ill wife in March, at a time when the UK government was urging the public to “stay home”, may put this progress in jeopardy.
“The extent to which people will be willing to continue following the rules has been threatened by the Dominic Cummings case. It sends a clear message to the public that government advice is open to interpretation,” says Bauld. This could be seen by some as an invitation to take risks that could go on to cost lives, she says.
Behavioural scientists who have been advising the UK government expressed concerns to New Scientist that the Cummings revelations threatened public compliance with the restrictions.
“To encourage a particular behaviour, it’s important that people perceive that everybody around them is doing that behaviour. That’s why it’s vital that we all see and hear how well people are complying,” says Val Curtis at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who has participated in the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), which advises the UK government on how best to get the public to stick to measures recommended by medical or epidemiological experts. “When attention turns to non-compliers, it effectively gives permission to people to deviate from a social norm,” she says.
“I would urge people to continue to maintain physical distancing and the other regulations, for their families, their neighbours and their community,” says John Drury at the University of Sussex, UK, who has also participated in SPI-B.
It is unclear whether the large-scale testing and contact tracing infrastructure needed to prevent the number of new cases rising will be ready in time. “We need to get our test, trace, isolate response up and running at scale,” says Bauld. “In the absence of a vaccine or effective treatments, in order to avoid a second wave we will need to understand where cases are rising and take swift action to contain local outbreaks.”
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