Lockdown is being dragged out by irrelevant ‘R value’, say MPS

LOCKDOWN may be needlessly prolonged by the Government’s reliance on an “irrelevant” infection rate measure, senior MPS and scientists have warned.

Ministers have been told that the national “R value” should not be regarded as key to unlocking the UK because the figure has been skewed upwards by Covid-19 cases in hospitals and care homes.

Meanwhile officials refused to say when data revealing the true transmission rates in the community, and in different parts of the country, would be made public.

The average national R value – the rate at which coronavirus is spreading – has become a daily feature at Downing Street press conferences, and is currently said to stand between 0.5 and 0.9.

Ministers believe the figure is the most important of five tests that must be passed before the UK can begin to return to normal life. On Thursday, Boris Johnson said “driving down the R” is the country’s “collective endeavour”.

But officials admitted this week that the national R value has been pushed upward in recent days by coronavirus spreading quickly in care homes, rather than in the community.

Greg Clark MP, chairman of the science and technology select committee, urged ministers not to rely too heavily on the “irrelevant” figure while deciding whether people could go back to work and see friends and family.

“There’s a concern that measures that could safely release people back into the community are not being taken because of an irrelevant R number determined by cases in care homes and hospitals,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“It’s not clear how the R rate in care homes is relevant to the R rates of people going about their daily business.

“If people are in a care home, by definition they are not going out into the community and infecting other people. But the single R number given out by the government has been skewed. It cannot reflect the reality outside, and we need to know whether crucial public policy decisions are being based on this number.” Mr Clark urged the government to release data showing the true rate of transmission in different parts of the UK, so the regional risks can be fully understood, as well as the spread of disease in the community.

The R0 number – or reproductive value – describes the average number of people an infected individual can expect to pass the coronavirus onto. If the figure is above one, that means the virus is continuing to spread rather than gradually dying away.

A lack of mass testing has hampered the ability of scientists to assess the true spread of the disease. Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, has said UK scientists calculating the R rate are relying instead on “all sorts of things including contacts, looking at genomics, looking at data from ambulances, hospital admissions, and so on”.

Five different modelling groups then fit mathematical models to the data before calculating the national R rate. The groups, known as SPI-M, met last weekend and agreed on a “consensus” between their methods to come up with one single number.

The figure was then presented to the Sage committee, which advises the Government during emergencies. On Thursday Sir Ian Diamond, the National Statistician, said he agreed with new estimates that the national R value has risen in recent weeks to between 0.75 and 1.0 due to cases in care homes.

But Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said: “The R number... is an average, so it glosses over differences between care homes, hospitals, the community, and any other segment of the population as well.

“It is a very, very crude number, and I, personally, I’m very against using that number as a policy objective in any way. I would be unhappy if the Government had a policy of keeping the R number below one.”

Asked at last night’s Downing Street press conference when the Government will share regional R rate data, Prof Stephen Powis, the national medical director for England, said: “I can’t give you the data by region... it will vary across geographies, it will vary from time to time but the important thing is to keep it below one.”