THE WORLD Health Organisation professor from Wokingham said that lives will be lost by scrapping the legal requirement for covid isolation now.
From today (Thursday) the government has ended most legal covid restrictions, including compulsory self isolation when someone has covid. Free testing will also be cut back.
Professor Ben Cowling, who did vital early work on covid in China and Hong Kong, also said that keeping free lateral flow tests would help public health.
On Tuesday, Professor Cowling, who is from Sonning and went to Reading School, said that “maintaining the legal requirements for isolation for a few more weeks would reduce the number of infections that occur in the coming month.”
It would also “reduce the consequent hospitalisations and deaths”.
He said: “Daily cases have been declining for more than six weeks since the peak in early January, but this wave is not yet over.
“I think it would make a lot of sense to continue with efforts to suppress transmission until the wave is mostly over, perhaps by the end of March.
“If measures are relaxed too early, the rate of decline in daily cases will slow down and ultimately the current wave will last for longer and infect more people.”
He hoped most people who had covid would continue to isolate. Timely isolation of symptomatic cases was one of the least disruptive measures that could effectively reduce covid spread.
Covid tests will no longer be free for most people from Friday, April 1.
Professor Cowling said that continuing free lateral flow tests free would “certainly benefit public health.”
The test results would help responsible behaviour and help reduce spread, particularly during covid epidemics.
He recommended people with a cough or cold who had to leave home should wear a mask near others, to protect others. People concerned about catching covid or other respiratory infections should wear masks especially when spending longer periods in crowded areas indoors. They were not necessary in the open air, he said.
In January 2020, Professor Cowling went with colleagues to China to work on a study which gave the first official estimates of how easily covid was passed on.
This was vital to know when covid was taking off. In February 2020, with just two Covid-19 cases in the UK, he predicted, in Wokingham Today, the possible start of a coronavirus epidemic in the UK by early March.
He also warned the new virus was “a real risk to global health.” He was proved right on both. He was awarded the MBE for services to public health and to research on covid.
