There is still a long way to go to prepare for a winter push. But the country is no longer as vulnerable as in March
Last modified on Friday, August 28, 2020 2:44 PM CEST
No one knows what the coming months will bring, but the advice that Britain will become a general again over Christmas already seems unlikely. Leicester, Greater Manchester and Preston have imposed local blockades after recording increases in Covid-19 cases, while increasing in Spain. and Germany are an alarming reminder of the difficulty of controlling this virus. Cold weather can potentially stimulate the spread of coronavirus and make social distance more difficult. The risks are transparent: is England ready?
“We want our game for autumn,” says Ewan Birney, deputy director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. “We’ll be further inside. Universities and schools will work. There will be a lot of contacts that not England has made significant progress over the summer in some of the disorders that made the first wave of coronavirus so disastrous, but this may not yet be enough and the effects have points that are difficult to predict.
“We can anticipate many more infections in the coming months,” says virologist Jonathan Ball of the University of Nottingham. The government has pledged 3 billion pounds in additional investments for the NHS, but more and more preparations may be urgently needed to address this winter’s demanding situations.
The nightmare situation for the NHS, according to Chris Hopson, executive leader of NHS Providers, is a combination of occasions that occur at the same time. A momentary outbreak of Covid-19, combined with a complicated flu outbreak and the same old pressures that winter exerts on fitness facilities, can come when the NHS attempts to restart facilities that were suspended by the crisis, all facing exhausted personnel. “We are fighting winter pressures at the most productive times, with inadequate bed capacity and network attention to meet the demand for levels,” Hopson says.
However, not everything is dark. The scenario for non-public protective appliances has improved, as has the availability of fans. However, what topics the most is the ability to try. England’s reaction was paralyzed by its lack of test capability in the first wave, when scientists and public fitness officials flew blindly, not knowing how widespread the virus was or where it was concentrated, and care homes were fatally exposed.
Now it’s someone else. The UK conducts tests as broadly and temporally as the maximum in European countries: around 200,000 a day. Most of them are analyzed in Lighthouse Labs created for this purpose, but redesigned college labs also help. “We are in a much higher position than they were at the beginning of the pandemic,” says molecular geneticist Andrew Beggs, who leads screening efforts at the University of Birmingham. “The government has a particularly higher capacity in a short period of time, and I am more confident than I am. Months ago. “
What is needed, Ball says, is “sentinel surveillance,” a targeted check to actively discover infection levels, especially in high-risk settings such as hospitals and nursing homes, as well as schools and universities. The Office of National Statistics is conducting a pilot survey to verify a representative pattern of families in the general population (up to 150,000 more people, according to the fortnight through October) to assess the extent of the infection. Such surveillance can alert public health departments and epidemiologists to hotspots so that they can be contained locally. This allows hospital staff to know which patients can stay in the general rooms and whether they themselves are in the paintings. Regular verification will be essential for frontline staff, such as public shipping personnel.
Tests are almost returned now within 48 hours (much more and have little value), and occasionally during the day. New tests developed through UK corporations such as Oxford Nanopore and DNANudge can hypothetically reduce waiting times to a few hours or less. Allow testing to be portable and performed on-site in places such as check-in at airports, grocery stores, shopping malls and factories. These features are still a long way off and feature the relevance of the first promising effects of the new methods. , as well as in the unproven ability of corporations to increase their production. But “even if a generation doesn’t paint for immediate projection on site, we have more in the paintings,” Beggs says.
However, the number of controls and their speed have not yet increased: Hopson believes we will want about 1 million controls according to the day until the end of December. “It’s a very complicated task,” he says. And the formula will have to be integrated: the result of a verification must be recorded without delay in the patient’s physical fitness record in order to make it available to local general doctors.
It is also imperative that the positive effects be followed through an intelligent search for contacts, which remains the weak link in the government’s Covid response. The number of other people contacted is much lower in the UK than in other countries, such as Germany, and it is not known how much they are lying down. “No knowledge has been published about this and we know this is not happening,” says Susan Michie, a professor of fitness psychology at University College London. able to isolate themselves for 14 days will have to be supported, as revenue source losses are covered through government.
And then there’s the school consultation. While it is sometimes accepted that the return of academics is a priority, this will inevitably lead to the spread of the virus. There is evidence that the best academics in schools can do this as much as adults, and young people at school number one can do so even if they only have mild symptoms (probably about 15-20% of inflamed young people have no symptoms). But there are encouraging symptoms that schools would probably not be as vital as originally thought. Sweden left schools open and didn’t see many epidemics or transmission, says Sanjay Patel, a representative of pediatric infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital in Southampton, and teachers had lower infection rates than taxi drivers or supermarket employees.
Patel predicts that schooling “will be particularly interrupted; there will be closures and epidemics, and many young people will be in school and not. “Children who get the same old winter sneezes “will want to be excluded without delay until they get the result of the control, and their parents will also want to isolate themselves this time. “There is no zero-risk option, but “the most productive way to protect against outbreaks in school is to minimize infection in the community,” Patel says. This means compensating for vacancies in schools with restrictions elsewhere. “Do we prioritize our ability to have a drink in the pub or the long-term schooling of our young people?”
So, are we ready? No, it would be almost even with a competent and functioning government. But we are not as extraordinarily vulnerable as in March. ” We have wonderful plans ready for this winter,” Patel adds. “We learned a lot from the first push and there’s surely no sense of panic. “
Philip Ball is a scientific writer