Half of Britons may already be infected

Impact could be lower than feared, says Oxford study

AS many as half of the people in Britain might already have been infected with a mild dose of coronavirus, according to the findings of a controversial study.

If true, many more people are resistant to the disease than the UK’s government experts believe – and the impact may be less than feared.

The new model from Oxford University suggests the virus was circulating in the UK by mid-January, around two weeks before the first reported case and a month before the first reported death.

The means it could have had enough time to have spread widely, with many Britons acquiring immunity. Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology who led the study, said testing was needed to assess the theory.

‘We need immediately to begin largescale serological surveys – antibody testing – to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now,’ she said.

The Oxford university research offers a contrasting view on the disease to the study that is informing UK government policy, which was carried out by experts at Imperial College London.

‘I am surprised there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,’ Professor Gupta told the Financial Times. The Imperial study has led to British prime minister Boris Johnson imposing a shutdown on the basis that, without such rules, the disease could claim up to 250,000 lives in the UK.

Before taking this decision, UK ministers had hoped that a buildup of ‘herd immunity’ – where swathes of people become resistant to the virus – could play a bigger role in defeating it.

Professor Gupta’s research suggests there is more herd immunity in the population than had been suspected. Both models suggest the outbreak will run for around two to three months but the professor’s model suggests the impact will be less grave than expected.

She said she still thought it was important to carry out measures such as physical distancing and quarantining to reduce the impact of the disease on the health service. The idea that a large proportion of the British population has been exposed to coronavirus is contradicted by evidence from other countries. In Germany and

South Korea, where widespread testing had been carried out, the number exposed is low.

Meanwhile, World Health Organization experts advised countries to ‘test, test, test’.

‘Circulating in January’