This rule is NOT scientific — and spells an economic catastrophe

The Government insists it is being ‘led by the science’ as it orders us to maintain a distance of two metres from each other at all times – despite the incalculable and increasingly visible damage this is causing to children’s education and the wider economy.

The problem is ministers and their advisers are being led only by the science they are hearing, which is too narrowly focused.

It fails to take into account other evidence suggesting one metre is completely safe for social distancing and would prevent us from sinking into an economic disaster it could take decades to escape from.

That’s the view of the World health Organisation and the european Centre for Disease Control. Many countries including Denmark, Sweden and Singapore have adopted the one-metre standard, and others have moved towards it.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, admitted this week that two metres is ‘not a rule’ but a ‘risk-based assessment’. In my view, it grossly overestimates the risk.

how the virus attacks our bodies is, of course, a question for doctors and biologists. But how it behaves in the air is a matter for engineers and physicists. And no one in No10 seems to be listening to them.

Because of how air currents circulate around our bodies, viruses are rarely transmitted between people breathing one metre apart.

When you breathe out on a cold day you can see your breath swirling upwards. Viral particles in your breath go up with it. even at the busy demonstrations and protests we have seen in recent days you will probably be safe. In a packed football stadium you might imagine viruses leap from one person to the next. But that’s not true, either.

For one thing, everyone in the stand is facing in one direction – and our breath doesn’t flow sideways. For another, the crowd is radiating heat which carries its breath upwards. Media reports have blamed Spanish fans for spreading the disease here at the match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid in March, where the crowd at Anfield numbered more than 50,000. But any transmission is very unlikely to have occurred in the stands.

It’s more probable that people crammed into busy pubs before the game passed on the virus – not by breathing, but by leaving particles on hard surfaces that other people later touched. That’s why it’s still so important that we wash our hands frequently and thoroughly, and avoid touching our faces.

Ministers need to look far more closely at the data on how a virus travels in the air.

FOr the sake of the nation’s health, we have to reopen workplaces. We know from gruelling experience in the early 1980s that high unemployment contributes to an increased mortality rate.

Many people assume halving the distance from two metres to one will mean doubling the number of people in a room. But that isn’t the case: It quadruples the number.

That is crucial and could save countless shops, restaurants and hotels that are facing bankruptcy. The same applies to classrooms. We can and should open schools by following the one-metre rule, as many of our european neighbours are.

The scientific evidence shows that we should bring in a one-metre rule immediately. The consequences of continuing to ignore this evidence are unimaginable.