Mass testing and tracing ‘almost certain’ to replace lockdown

The first hint of what Britain’s exit strategy from lockdown will be has been revealed by one of the Government’s top advisers.

Prof Neil Ferguson, whose team at Imperial College London has driven the current strategy, said mass testing and contact tracing would “almost certainly” replace restrictions once numbers had fallen substantially.

He told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One that hospital admissions were now decreasing on a daily basis, and he hoped the epidemic would plateau in the next seven to 10 days.

The number of daily deaths fell over the weekend from 708 on Saturday to 621 on Sunday, and Prof Ferguson said overall deaths may end up being as low as 7,000.

Until now it has been unclear how the Government planned to end the lockdown, with some experts forecast ing that intermittent restrictions, or regional quarantines could last until a vaccine or treatment was available.

Boris Johnson is due to review the measures for the first time this week, but Prof Ferguson said the current restrictions could be lifted in a matter of weeks.

“When the lockdown ends will depend really on what happens to this epidemic, how quickly case numbers decline. There is no point in having gone through this effort, and releasing the lockdown at a point where case numbers are high and then we’ll surge faster than we’ve seen before,” he said.

“We want case numbers to get to a low point where we can start substituting other measures for the most intrusive and economically costly aspects of the current lockdown and almost certainly these additional measures will involve massively ramped up testing going back to trying to identify contacts of cases and stopping chains of transmission. That can only feasibly be done when we have many fewer cases per day than at the moment.”

The NHS digital arm is working on a contact tracing app that would notify people if they had come into close contact with someone who later tested positive, so that they could self-isolate before infecting many people. The strategy has worked successfully in other countries such as South Korea and the Government has promised 100,000 daily tests by the end of April.

Prof Ferguson said some other strategies may be deployed, such as keeping vulnerable people in lockdown for longer or focusing on specific geographical areas.

Dr Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer, has previously said that some measures may need to be in place for up to six months.

“The precise strategy has not been formulated,” Prof Ferguson added: “It will be in the next week or two and it has the highest priority of the whole scientific and medical community.”

Prof Martin Hibberd, a professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “A combination of some social distancing measures, extensive testing and automated contact tracing could allow both a more regular social activity and a significant control of the outbreak.”

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said the length of the lockdown “all depends on how the British people behave”.

It is likely that travel restrictions will be kept in place from areas that have high infection rates. Prof Ferguson estimated that in the early stages of the outbreak, Public Health England had only managed to trace and isolate one third of people coming into the country with the virus, which seeded the epidemic.

Speaking on Radio 4 over the weekend, he said: “We want to move to a situation where at least by the end of May we’re able to substitute some less intensive measures, more based on technology and testing, for the complete lockdown we have now.”