CORONAVIRUS
■ Three new cases in UK ■ £152bn wiped off shares
THREE more people in the UK were yesterday confirmed to have contracted Covid-19, bringing the total number to 16.
The latest victims were diagnosed with the deadly virus after travelling to Italy and Tenerife.
Health officials said the pair had been transferred to specialist units combating the coronavirus outbreak – one to Royal Liverpool hospital and the other to the Royal Free in London.
Last night it was revealed that the third victim was the first confirmed case in Northern Ireland.
After one of the three was revealed to be the parent of a child at Burbage Primary School in the Peak District spa town of Buxton, Derbyshire, the school promptly closed yesterday.
Head teacher Anthony Tierney shut the building down for a deep clean after confirming that a parent had been diagnosed with coronavirus.
The parent is understood to have recently returned to the town from Tenerife after staying at the Costa Adeje Palace Hotel, where four Italian tourists tested positive for coronavirus this week.
Mr Tierney was on site at the school yesterday to speak to concerned parents and confirmed that the gates would remain closed for the day. It is understood the school may not reopen until Monday at the earliest.
But panicked parents took to social media after receiving a message announcing the closure just before 11pm on Wednesday night.
Many complained about the lack of a full explanation as to whether the infected parent had been on the school premises.
The school, which has 347 pupils, gave no further details about the coronavirus victim.
But the message sent to parents and carers read: “Due to a confirmed case of coronavirus among our parent population, Burbage Primary School will be closed as a precautionary measure to enable a deep clean to be completed.”
The nearby Buxton Medical Practice was also closed yesterday, with patients ringing to book an appointment told that it was because an infected patient had visited the GP surgery. Meanwhile in London, one of Britain’s most prestigious private schools also yesterday shut down after students who visited coronavirus-hit countries over half-term fell ill – with the head teacher blaming NHS delays for forcing her hand.
The £19,000-a-year
Dulwich Prep in south London has been closed until Monday at the earliest after several children in different parts of the school became unwell this week after foreign holidays. Dulwich Prep’s head teacher Louise Davidson told parents today that the delays meant the school had to be closed while they wait for the results of coronavirus tests.
Mrs Davidson refused to reveal the countries they visited on holiday, but said: “Unrelated pupils from different sections of school have returned after half-term having been on holiday. They were healthy when they returned but have since become unwell.
“The families have contacted NHS 111, self-isolated and are awaiting the results of tests.
“NHS 111 has been inundated with calls since the half-term break and the delay our families have had in accessing medical help has influenced our decision.”
Ministers have warned that they expect more cases to emerge and have called for people not to panic.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “The NHS is a fantastic service and we’ve made every possible preparation for any eventuality.
“If you are concerned about travelling abroad to an area that’s infected the key thing is to look at the Foreign Office website.”
Before Northern Ireland’s revelation, England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty confirmed yesterday’s two new cases.
He said: “Two further patients in England have tested positive for Covid-19.
“The virus was passed on in Italy and Tenerife and the patients have been transferred to specialist NHS infection centres in Royal Liverpool Hospital and the Royal Free
Hospital, London.” Health chiefs did not confirm when the patients returned to the UK, raising fears they may have passed the virus on.
Thousands of British families jetted off to Europe last week for halfterm breaks, with northern Italy and Tenerife popular destinations.
But some 16 cases have now been confirmed on British soil – though until yesterday all of them had been linked to the Far East.
The virus has yet to spread between humans in the UK.
Leading scientists have said that new cases are not surprising.
Advice includes frequently washing hands with soap and water, as well as use and dispose of tissues to catch any coughs and sneezes.
Alarm over the spread of the virus has now seen at least 14 schools closed, while at least 20 more have sent pupils and teachers home for a fortnight after some have come down with colds and coughs after ski trips to coronavirus-hit Italy during half term.
Prince George and Princess Charlotte’s private school, St Thomas’s Battersea, is one of the latest to send pupils home.
IFEAR the dozen schools, from Middlesbrough to Southampton, reported to have closed as a result of coronavirus will be just the beginning. It will take only a few more cases to be confirmed in Britain and the country will come to resemble China. Sports fixtures will be called off, transport services will be suspended, shopping centres will empty – as well as tens of thousands of children being sent home from school.
Already hundreds of workers at Canary Wharf in London were sent home on Wednesday and one match in rugby union’s Six Nations championship has been postponed until later in the year.
When panic takes hold, it is very difficult to stop it.
As we saw with the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, and just about every time it snows, businesses and public authorities become very easily gripped by the precautionary principle.
They close things down because they fear the conse- quences of failing to act. Only when it is too late do they start to ask what effect their overreaction has had on the economy.
We are in the same position now. We could very easily end up in a situation where hysteria does much more harm than the virus itself. Already, stock markets around the world have plunged as investors fear the effect of the virus on global growth. It wouldn’t take too much more to tip the world into recession, with all the misery that entails.
OF COURSE we need to take coronavirus seriously. It ought not really take a viral epidemic to remind us to wash our hands before eating. That was drummed into us religiously when I was a child.
People with symptoms of viral illness need to self-isolate – which, again, they should be doing anyway, coronavirus or no coronavirus.
But panic measures merely threaten to make the situation worse. Close a primary school and several hundred children will suddenly need childcare.
Many parents will have to take time off work making it difficult to keep hospitals and surgeries fully staffed.
That is one reason why Government plans for a pandemic have shied away from recommending the closure of schools – advice which was reiterated by Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday.
Yet schools themselves are making the decision to close, long before coronavirus can be called a pandemic.
To put coronavirus into perspective, up until Wednesday the World Health Organisation (WHO) had recorded 82,785 confirmed cases globally, along with 2,817 deaths. By contrast, according to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), ordinary seasonal flu kills between 292,000 and 646,000 people globally every year.
Of course, the WHO’s figures may be an underestimate. As a professor of epidemiology explained on the Today programme yesterday morning, there could be thousands of people in Italy infected with the disease, well beyond the 322 recorded by the WHO.
That might sound frightening in one sense, but the reason they are not aware they have the disease ought to be reassuring. It is so mild that they have mistaken it for a common cold.
Coronavirus has the fear of the unknown, but the picture is becoming clearer by the day.
It seems to have a death rate of one per cent or less and, as with flu, most who succumb have existing health conditions.
It makes sense for the very elderly and infirm to avoid crowded places until the epidemic has subsided. And of course hospitals need to take very particular precautions – as they always have to, being natural breeding grounds for infectious disease.
But as for the rest of us there is no reason why we should not be going about our daily business as usual and to carry on doing so even if the number of cases here grows – so long as we keep on washing our hands, not sneezing over other people and taking care to self-isolate if we experience symptoms.
It is far from inevitable that we will see a big rise in the number of cases reported.
YOU would never know from the hysterical way in which some people have been talking, but the rate of new infections has fallen substantially over the past week. In the seven days to Wednesday, 5,679 people globally were confirmed as having the disease. In the previous seven days it was 12,622.
We have been through these panics before, with SARS, bird flu and swine flu all within the past two decades.
None of them came to much and there is no reason to fear that coronavirus will turn out to be a grave threat either.
‘We could easily end in a situation where hysteria does more harm’