Covid: New quarantine rules started in England and Northern Ireland

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Professor Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease modeling expert and epidemiologist from Imperial College London, told BBC Radio 4’s Today program that relaxing the isolation rules would “inevitably” slightly reduce the effectiveness of contact tracing – but if people were not tested, there would be “taking in the transmission.

He says it’s a “political judgment” on whether or not a PCR test should be done, but notes that so far the overall population has been “extremely cautious” when Covid restrictions were lifted.

Asked if we could still see 100,000 new infections a day, Professor Ferguson said case numbers had “stabilised” but were still “very high” at around 30,000 a day, a situation of “a bit worrying” in September.

He adds that while contact rates are “about half normal levels” due to school holidays and people still working from home, we still have the potential for a major wave of infections in September and October “when children go back to school and workers go back to offices.”

Professor Ferguson says it is currently difficult to predict whether we can see 100,000 cases per day, but this vaccination means it is “unlikely” that we will see the number of Covid deaths compared to the levels we saw in January.

But he cautioned that this could have an impact on NHS demand and hospitalizations, with a “worst-case scenario” possibly as high as 1,000 admissions a day, which could “stress” a health system already trying to reduce the backlog of treatment.

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