Staffing crisis may be eased if isolation is cut admits Zahawi
CUTTING Covid self-isolation to five days would be ‘helpful’ in easing staff shortages in schools, hospitals and the economy, the Education Secretary said yesterday.
Nadhim Zahawi became the most senior government figure to back the idea of reducing the mandatory quarantine period from seven days to five as fears mounted over the impact of more than a million people being forced into isolation.
Ministers have already cut isolation times from ten days to seven for those who can provide negative tests on two consecutive days.
But Downing Street has so far refused to follow the lead of countries like France and the United States in reducing the period to just five days.
Mr Zahawi, the former vaccines minister, said that a further cut would ‘certainly help mitigate some of the pressures on schools, on the critical workforce and others’.
He said staff absence levels in schools were around 8.5 per cent last week but ‘will increase, no doubt, because now schools are back we’re going to see an
‘Next two weeks will be bumpy’
increase in infection rates’. The Department for Education has modelled scenarios in which staff absences could reach 25 per cent this month.
The NHS has also been hit hard, with military medics brought in to help London hospitals and troops on standby to drive ambulances.
Downing Street said last week that the UK Health Security Agency had been asked to keep the issue under ‘constant review’.
The health quango said this month that between 10 and 30 per cent of people could still be infectious on day six.
The body warned that allowing people to return to work early in settings like hospitals could ‘worsen staff shortages if it led to more people being infected’.
Mr Zahawi acknowledged the need to be led by the scientific data, but said it was worth looking again at whether a further cut to quarantine was possible.
‘I think if the experts – and I defer to the UK Health and Security Agency – deem it appropriate that you can have two negative tests on consecutive days, as we do now with days six and seven, then it’s a good thing to keep under review,’ he said. ‘It would certainly help.’ Mr Zahawi said he was making contingency plans for rising rates of staff being off.
He added that some schools have had absence rates of up to 40 per cent but remained open.
‘I have to have contingency plans for 10, 15, 20, 25 per cent absenteeism because Omicron is far more infectious,’ he added. He said the next two weeks would be ‘bumpy’ with rising staff absence rates.
On exams, the Education Secretary said: ‘My absolute commitment is that exams are going ahead both this January and for the summer, for GCSEs and A-levels.’ Disruption to pupils’ studies would still be taken into account in marking, he added.