Effectiveness of two-metre rule called into question

Bill Gardner Robert Mendick THE two-metre rule on social distancing is based on outdated science that may have overestimated the risk by up to 15 times, senior MPS and scientists have warned.

The Government yesterday said the rule would stay in place despite a major study showing the comparative risk of halving the distance to one metre was far less than previously thought.

Business leaders and MPS have called for the guidance to be changed to match that of the World Health Organisation in order to avoid mass redundancies and help the hospitality sector reopen.

Last week, Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, suggested two metres was still necessary as the risk of spreading the virus remained too great.

“It’s not an absolute [that] beyond two metres is safe and slightly less is not safe, there’s a graduation across that, and so roughly at a metre it’s somewhere between 10 and 30 times more risky than at two metres,” Sir Patrick said on May 28.

But, an analysis published yesterday in The Lancet found the risk of standing one metre apart was only twice that of standing two metres apart – a 2.6 per cent chance of catching the disease compared to 1.3 per cent. Keeping one metre apart cuts the overall risk of catching coronavirus by 80 per cent, the study found. Prof Robert Dingwall, a government adviser on Covid-19, said scientists backing the two-metre rule were relying too heavily on “experimental lab work that doesn’t translate into a real world setting”.

Prof Dingwall said that too many scientists were basing their calculations for safe distancing on transmission of the disease in the laboratory, failing to take into account real-world conditions in which air flow played a huge part in dispersing the virus.

He believes there is almost zero risk of catching Covid-19 outdoors and that one metre is sufficient for maintaining a safe social distance.

However, a spokesman for No10 said yesterday that the Government still believes the two-metre rule should remain in place.

Greg Clark, chairman of the science and technology committee, said ministers should only be using the most “upto-date” scientific analysis to decide whether to reduce the distance.

“Now the world has several months’ experience of the coronavirus we have the chance to learn how countries with different rules – such as Germany, Australia and Singapore – have fared in practice,” he told The Daily Telegraph.