The reopening of outdoor hospitality venues today should lead to a “relatively modest” increase in infections if people stick to the rules, a government scientific adviser has said.
Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a member of the Spi-M modelling group, said that a rise in hospitalisations was likely only if people began mixing indoors and urged people to wait until restrictions could be safely lifted in a month or two.
With cases and deaths at their lowest for seven months, some have argued for the easing of rules to be accelerated but Kucharski argued that “restrictions still do the hard work in keeping transmission down” and cases could rise quickly with millions still unvaccinated. “It is really those restrictions that are slowing down transmission and we do need that caution as things re open,” he told Today on Radio 4.
“We’re in a situation where essentially our defences are partially built against the virus,” he added. “We’ve got things [to] very low levels but we have seen how quickly things can come back, particularly with that remaining susceptibility.”
He said that allowing people who had been fully vaccinated to mix would “create a lot of risk and a lot of confusion”, saying that it could endanger unvaccinated people living with those who started meeting.
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It would be better to think about “how we can get to a situation in a month or two, where far larger a number of people are safe, and we can reopen confident that we’re not going to see the sort of level of hospitalisations we’d see if that happened now”.
Mixing outdoors is much less risky and Kucharski said: “We’d expect this step actually to be relatively modest in terms of transmission increase: based on what we saw last year, probably about a 5 to 10 per cent increase in transmission at this stage.
“Obviously if people change their behaviour beyond that, start to take more risks, particularly in a situation where a lot of people haven’t had their second vaccine dose, that could translate into a lot more severe outcomes.”
Mike Tildesley, of the University of Warwick, another member of Spi-M, told Times Radio: “With any form of reopening there’s going to be more mixing, and so we might expect that that could lead to higher risk. This is exactly why this road map has got five weeks in between the next couple of relaxations: it gives us enough time to monitor what happens.
“All the signs are pretty good at the moment,” he said, but added that it was “really, really important therefore that people follow the rules that are in place with this relaxation”.
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“There is never going to be zero risk, there’s always the possibility that even with those precautions you could get infected but you’re minimising your own risk of being infected and also potentially passing the virus on,” he said.
He added that “we’re not there yet” when it comes to socialising indoors, which carries a higher risk of transmission.
Sir David King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government, pointed to Chile as a warning of what could happen if restrictions were relaxed too fast.
“Chile is a country where the rate of vaccination amongst the population was third highest in the world — they were ahead of us in terms of the number of people who have had the vaccine — and they’re suddenly now into a third wave,” he told Sky News.
“So what has happened in Chile is very, very surprising. A high percentage of people have been vaccinated, but here’s a variant of the disease coming through the country.”
