Covid-19 new cases and deaths will remain high for weeks, warn UK health leaders

Scientists advising the government have predicted that between 43 and 84 people will still be dying from Covid-19 every day by mid-August, as health leaders called on the government to adopt a “zero Covid” approach and seek total elimination of the virus.

On Wednesday, the government’s official dashboard showed 83 Covid-19 associated deaths and 763 newly lab-confirmed infections. Modellers from the MRC Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge University, however, estimate that there are far more new cases – approximately 3,000 a day – and that deaths will stay high for weeks to come.

default

There appears to have been a slight rise in infections as lockdown restrictions have eased. While there are a number of different sources of data, the figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) resemble those of Cambridge, at 2,700 a day last week – which was an increase on the 2,500 of the week before.

If those infections are among young people and a significant proportion are mild or even asymptomatic, that may not translate into a big rise in deaths. Nonetheless, hopes among the scientific community of reaching zero Covid-19 deaths are fading, raising fears that the disease will not be contained into winter and there will be a second wave of the sort experienced in Europe.

The Independent Sage committee of leading scientists and medical experts advocates an elimination strategy. Scotland and Northern Ireland have set a zero Covid-19 infections target. Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the chair of the British Medical Association, urged ministers to do the same in England.

“We should have a mindset of that and aim for it,” he told the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus of MPs and peers. “At the moment we aren’t doing everything we can to contain the virus. The attitude should be: we want to do everything we can to ensure that the virus doesn’t spread.”

Zero transmission should be the government’s ambition, he said, but ministers had not set out a systematic approach to achieving total elimination and a “clear, single-minded determination” to do everything possible seemed to be absent.

Niall Dickson, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, agreed that ministers should switch to a zero Covid-19 policy. “The aim should be of course to eliminate the virus and we should do everything possible to get to that point,” he said. However, he added, ministers should only declare that ambition if their scientific advisers said that it was achievable.

NHS bosses in England are very worried about a second surge in infections coinciding with next winter, given it will bring the usual increase in people with other respiratory illnesses, he added.

Related: 'One big wave' – why the Covid-19 second wave may not exist

“I would say in relation to the second spike issue or something coming, the levels of concern among our members – the people who are leading NHS trusts, who are leading in primary care and all levels in the systems – is very high. There’s real concern about winter and the compounding factors there, but also about an earlier spike,” he said.

Scientists are anxious that the lockdown measures in the UK are neither tough enough nor being well enough observed to avoid either localised rises in infections and deaths, or a second wave. The increase being seen in infections needs to be nipped in the bud, they say.

“What I fear is that if we fail to check this flare up, we will head into the winter months with a high level of circulating virus,” said Prof James Naismith, the director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute.

“With the normal winter illnesses [coughs, colds, flu] and greater indoor living, we could then see a return to exponential growth in Covid-19 cases that overwhelms the NHS and requires complete lockdown. This is what I term a second wave. Many scientists have consistently emphasised that we have only short time to get our systems ready to prevent this.”