A Government scientist launched a scathing attack on ministers yesterday accusing them of “ignoring Covid” as new daily cases hit nearly 50,000.
Stephen Reicher, professor of psychology at the University of St Andrews and a member of the Government’s Sage subcommittee advising on behavioural science – the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling operational sub-group (SPI-M-O) – slammed the Government’s current policy to fight Covid-19 as new daily infections reached 49,156 on Monday.
He accused the Government of watching Covid “rage” in the UK as ministers “do nothing about it”.
Sharing a screenshot of a story from French newspaper Le Monde headlined: “Covid-19: Since this summer, the United Kingdom has decided to ‘live with the virus’ and cases have exploded”, Prof Reicher said on Twitter: “The world watches agape as the UK watches Covid rage and does nothing about it.
“Nearly 50,000 cases a day Over 5,000 hospitalisation a week 50 hour waits for A&E. Almost 5 planeloads of people dying every 7 days. And they know that it really doesn’t have to be like this (sic).”
He added: “They know, because they are living it, that there is an alternative.”
The professor, who has criticised Government policy several times during the pandemic, also blasted Labour for failing to voice an alternative policy.
“The real tragedy in the UK is not just that the Government continues to ignore the pandemic, but that there is no coherent voice from the sadly misnamed ‘opposition parties’ to articulate that alternative,” he wrote.
“However woeful Johnson might be, he gets away with it because he can channel Margaret Thatcher and claim (politically at least) that ‘There is No Alternative’.”
His comments came as Professor Neil Ferguson, also a member of Sage, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the Government “was very clear that it wanted to move away from social distancing measures, but it’s notable, clearly, that most Western European countries have kept in place more control measures, vaccine mandates, mask-wearing mandates, and tend to have lower case numbers”.
He added: “But at the end of the day this is a policy decision for Government to make.”
Prof Ferguson warned that “people need to be aware that we have currently higher levels of infection in the community than we’ve almost ever had during the pandemic”.
He added that he does not think the UK will be subject to another lockdown and said: “The worst case here are demands on the NHS… it’s very unlikely we’ll see anything like the levels of deaths we saw last year, for instance.
“Coming into the winter, there may be a Plan B which needs to be implemented, which involves some rolling back of measures, but I doubt that we’ll ever get close to lockdown we were in in January of this year.”
The latest data by the UK Health Security Agency on weekly hospital admissions for Covid-19 was 6.03 per 100,000 of the population, up from 5.74 per 100,000 last week.
There are currently 7,097 patients in hospital being treated for Covid, 791 are on ventilators. Of those patients 5,561 were admitted in the last seven days, with 915 patients admitted on 12 October when the data was last updated.
On Monday, 45 deaths were reported, bringing the total number of deaths in the past seven days to 869. The rolling average number of daily deaths is 124.1 up from 111.4 a week ago.
Professor Reicher’s claim of 50 hour waits for A&E appears to be sourced from an Independent article from Monday which reported multiple hospitals across England declaring incidents and experiencing record waits for patients to see doctors.
The publication cited information showing several patients at the Royal Preston Hospital in Lancashire have faced lengthy waits for beds in recent days exceeding 40 hours, with one patient waiting at least 47 hours there.
Monday’s daily Covid case figure was the highest since “freedom day” on 19 July – which saw the majority of remaining lockdown restrictions lifted in England – a steady rise from the 40,224 recorded a week ago and 35,077 two weeks ago.