‘Back to square one’ warning from professor
Worry over early lift to lockdown
A Perth respiratory expert has said lifting COVID restrictions too early risks taking the country“back to square one”.
Professor James Chalmers made the comments after speaking on the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme on Friday.
Despite cases continuing to fall in Perth and Kinross, he said the number of younger patients in hospital recently showed “anybody is at risk of getting severe COVID”.
The British Lung Foundation chair of respiratory research said: “We started to see the number of people testing positive coming down from the height of 2500 cases just after Christmas to now - still very high but lower than it was - around 1600.
“We are by no means out of the woods yet but this is really encouraging news that the restrictions are starting to slow down the pandemic.”
The academic - who lives in Perth said a “stronger lockdown” was needed because of the new variant which passes more easily from person to person.
He added: “Unfortunately that probably means it’s going to take a long time for the cases to come down from where they are at the moment. It’s still a very high level which means that these lockdown measures are likely to need to be in place for quite a while.”
The most recent data from Public Health Scotland shows a seven-day infection rate of 147.4 per 100,000 in Perth and Kinross - down from 179 the week before.
Crucially, the proportion of positive tests has dropped from 8.7 per cent to 6.8 per cent.
However, 30 people died from the virus in for the first two full weeks of the year - the worst two-week period of the entire pandemic.
Dr Chalmers said he was “quite shocked” by the number of younger patients with no underlying conditions severely ill with COVID.
He said: “We are seeing less of the patients in the risk groups because we are doing more to protect those populations and also the vaccine programme is now getting out into places like care homes.
“But we have had a terrible reminder over the past few weeks that anybody is at risk of getting severe COVID including the young and including middle-aged people without underlying conditions.”
Prof Chalmers said there was reassuring data showing the new UK variant would be covered by the vaccine and natural immunity.
However, he said there were worrying variants such as the South African variant “that seem to be able to evade immunity and may have reduced susceptibility to the protection you get from the vaccine”.
He said: “I think that emphasises the importance of travel restrictions which many of us have been calling for since early last year to avoid the importation of potentially dangerous new variants to the UK. And I think we need to carefully monitor that over time.”
The professor from Perth added: “The great news is that the vaccines can be modified to cover new variants.”
He went on: “I think we mustn’t lift these restrictions too quickly.
“If we lift the restrictions in March and we then have a lockdown in April that doesn’t help anybody. And it increases the death rate and it increases the strain on hospitals.”
He said in order for restrictions to be lifted “we would have to be in a position where we feel the epidemic is controlled and there is low enough cases that we can get the test, trace and isolate system back up and running”.
After the programme he tweeted: “Lifting restrictions too early while vaccine is rolled out would bring us back to square one.”