TOUGHEST OF LOCKDOWNS MAY NOT HALT MUTANT VIRUS
Professor’s warning over new strain... while hospital admissions soar to highest level yet
SCOTLAND’S strict lockdown may not be enough to contain a new mutant coronavirus strain, experts have warned.
Professor Mark Woolhouse yesterday said the variant of Covid-19 spreading rapidly across the country will not be as easy to suppress as the one that sparked the previous lockdown.
And he warned that simply stopping the situation getting any worse ‘would be a good outcome’.
His comments came as the latest figures showed a massive surge in the number of people receiving treatment in hospitals – with 1,384 inpatients.
This is the highest number of hospitalisations due to Covid since the first wave of the pandemic last year.
With another 37 people admitted overnight, this takes the current total to the highest of the second wave.
A further 2,039 people have tested positive for coronavirus, 10.5 per cent of those who took a test.
There are now 95 people in intensive care units, while the Scottish Government confirmed 68 deaths had been registered in the 24-hour period.
On Monday, Scotland was plunged back into a national lockdown with a legally enforceable stay-at-home order in place until at least the end of January.
Schools and nurseries have been closed to all but the children of key workers until February 1 at the earliest, with travel bans
‘We have to temper expectations’
put in place and closures of all non-essential venues such as pubs, shops, gyms, cafes and restaurants.
While a similar move helped to almost eliminate the virus in Scotland last year, experts have warned the fast- spreading variant of the virus is unlikely to be controlled by the measures as quickly.
Professor Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said it is too early to tell the impact of the new restrictions.
Speaking to the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme, he said: ‘It should be about a week before we see the immediate impact on cases. We have to temper expectations.
‘The new variant is not going to be as easy to control as the old variant. We’ll have to wait and see whether it’s actually a decrease in cases or simply stopping the situation getting worse, stopping there being any further increase – and that, at this point in time, would be a good outcome.
‘The epidemiologists are in two minds. Some people say that the schools being out will decrease the number of cases – but some have said Christmas holidays will have increased them so I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait and see for a couple of weeks before we know clearly what the trends are.
‘What we have got to be prepared for, as Nicola Sturgeon has said, is the fact that this is going to go on for some time.’
Earlier this week, the First Minister signalled that lockdown restrictions could be in place for months – but insisted she would seek to release them before May.
The Scottish Government is hoping to vaccinate all over-50s and those younger with underlying health conditions by the beginning of May following the approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech and OxfordAstrazeneca jabs.
Professor Woolhouse, a member of the Scottish Government’s Covid-19 advisory group, said the vaccines are a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. Asked when he believes lockdown restrictions could be lifted, he said: ‘[No one] should anticipate a full return to normality for really quite some time.’
England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty has said that some restrictions could be reintroduced next winter to continue combating the virus.
Professor Woolhouse said this was a ‘plausible scenario’ but claimed it was a ‘pessimistic’ forecast. He said: ‘ At the moment there is no prospect at all of this virus going away so we’re going to have to learn to live with it.
‘I hope they’re not social-distancing, lockdown-type restrictions, they don’t need to be.
‘Testing, mass testing, test and trace, isolation of cases, hygiene, social distancing when we meet, that all helps. My hope is that that will be enough for next winter.’
Miss Sturgeon has warned she may not be able to lift lockdown restrictions for months amid fears over the mutant virus strain.
Mainland Scotland is currently in a full lockdown with a legally enforced stay-at-home order introduced. Anyone leaving home without an essential reason for doing so – such as grocery shopping or exercise – will face fines.
Asked earlier this week if the lockdown would be kept in place until May, by which time the most vulnerable are expected to have been vaccinated, Miss Sturgeon said: ‘No, not necessarily.’
But she added: ‘I can’t be definitive right now about when we will lift these restrictions.’