UK 'much more heavily affected' by coronavirus than expected, Professor Neil Ferguson says

The UK was much more heavily affected by the coronavirus pandemic than anticipated, former Government adviser and epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson has said.

Prof Ferguson, who quit as an adviser on coronavirus last month after breaking lockdown restrictions, said "most chains of transmission" still existing in the UK originated in Spain and Italy.

“The UK had been much more heavily affected that we had previously anticipated, really in early March, in Spain and Italy…so that’s one of the reasons we have, if not the largest, one of the largest epidemics in Europe,” he told the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Tuesday.

“Going forward, what the models say is that we have limited room for manoeuvre, that this is a highly transmissible pathogen.

“We’ve reduced transmission by about 80 per cent, but to maintain control we need to keep that transmission suppressed by about 65 per cent or so.

“So we have a little bit of wiggle room, so it will be a learning experience as to how we allow society to resume while maintaining control of transmission.”

Prof Ferguson said transmission from Spain and Italy in late February and early March meant the epidemic was further ahead than modellers anticipated.

“One thing the genetic data is showing us now is most chains of transmission still existing in the UK originated in Spain, to some extent Italy,” he said.

“So we had been worrying about importation of infection from China, we’re a very well-connected country in the world, other Asian countries, the US.

“But it’s clear that before we were even in a position to measure it, before surveillance systems were set up, there were many hundreds, if not thousands, of infected individuals who came into the country in late February and early March from that area.

“And that meant the epidemic was further ahead than we anticipated which explains some of the acceleration of policy then, but it also explains why, to some extent, why mortality figures ended up being higher than we had hoped.”

Although Prof Ferguson said he expects the number of cases to remain "relatively" flat between now and September, he warned about the impact of policy changes.

“I suspect though, under any scenario that levels of transmission and numbers of cases will remain relatively flat between now and September, short of very big policy changes or behaviour changes in the community,” he said.

“The real uncertainty then is if there are larger policy changes in September, of course we move into time of year when respiratory viruses tend to transmit slightly better, what will happen then.

“And that remains very unclear.”

He added that he was “shocked” at how badly care home populations were protected globally.

“I, like many people, am shocked about how badly European – or countries around the world – have protected care home populations,” he said.

Asked about what could be done in future, he said: “If we had done a better job, or did do a better job, of reducing transmission in closed institutions like hospitals and care homes, we would have a little bit more room, wiggle room as it were.

“The infections in care homes and hospitals spilled back into the community, more commonly from the people who work in those institutions.

“So if you can drive the infection rates low in those institutional settings, you drive the infection lower in the community as a whole.”

Meanwhile, Professor Matt Keeling, of the University of Warwick, told the committee that Italy was the “big eye-opener” when modelling on coronavirus.

“Most of the models started once there was already data available from Wuhan, so that wasn’t really changing much, but I think actually the biggest changes were trying to understand the situation in Italy," he said.

“I think it was unclear in the early stages of the Wuhan outbreak whether we were going to get a similar sort of scale in the UK or elsewhere in the world.

“So really I think Italy was the big eye-opener, that we realised that we could have a large potential outbreak in the UK.”

He also suggested that modellers “dropped the ball” with regards to care homes early in the crisis.

“In the early stages, in the absence of a lockdown, the very alarmist values that were coming out were really about a worst-case scenario,” he told the committee.

“So if we just let the epidemic run, how bad could it be? And that’s the sort of information policy makers needed at that time.

“If the lockdown had been very strict, if we’d have thought more about what was happening in care homes and hospitals, as you’ve heard, early on maybe that was one of the areas where modellers did drop the ball.

“With hindsight, it’s very easy to say we know care homes and hospitals are these huge collections of very vulnerable individuals, so maybe with hindsight we could have modelled those early on and thought about the impacts there.”

He added: “Considering the amount of information we had at the time, I think the models offer our best estimates of what could happen in the short-term. Long-term predictions are much, much more difficult.”

It came as new statistics suggest the number of people in England who have died after contracting coronavirus is nearly 10,000 higher than official Government figures show.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show there were 42,210 deaths recorded involving Covid-19 in England in the period ending May 22, compared with 32,666 reported by Department for Health.

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