Coronavirus is ‘not going to disappear’, warns UK’s chief medical officer

Social distancing measures will be needed until at least the end of this year in the absence of a vaccine or a cure for coronavirus, Britain's chief medical officer has warned. Chris Whitty described as "incredibly small" the likelihood of a vaccine or a treatment becoming available within the next calendar year.

“Until we have those, and the probability of having those any time in the next calendar year are incredibly small and I think we should be realistic about that, we’re going to have to rely on other social measures, which of course are very socially disruptive, as everyone is finding at the moment. But until that point, that is what we will have to do,” he told a press conference in Downing Street.

Prof Whitty was speaking after Britain's death toll in hospitals from the coronavirus rose to 18,100, an increase of 759 over the previous day. Pointing to the hundreds still dying from the virus every day in Italy and Spain weeks after infections peaked in those countries, he said Britain could also expect to see many more deaths in the coming weeks.

R number

Prof Whitty said the aim was to keep the force of transmission of the virus – known as the R number – below 1, so that each infected person would on average infect less than one other person.

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“This disease is not going to be eradicated, its not going to disappear, so we have to accept that we are working with a disease that [is] going to be with us globally... for the foreseeable future. What we are trying to work out is what are the things that actually add up to an R of less than 1, and there are lots of different options that ministers will have to consider,” he said.

“We have to be realistic that if people are hoping that it’s suddenly going to move from where we are now in lockdown, suddenly into everything’s gone, that is a wholly unrealistic expectation. We are going to have to do a lot of things for really quite a long period of time – the question is what is the best package.”

We were slow into lockdown, slow on testing, slow on protective equipment

Earlier, health secretary Matt Hancock told MPs that Britain had reached the peak of the epidemic and he defended the government's record on testing and on providing personal protective equipment (PPE) to healthcare and nursing home staff who need it.

‘Contact tracing’

"As we have reached the peak and as we bring the number of new cases down, we will introduce contact tracing at large scale. The introduction of the new NHS app for contact tracing is also in development. As we do this, we are working closely with some of the best digital and technological brains, and renowned experts in clinical safety and digital ethics, so that we can get all this right," he said.

Downing Street said the government had also started work on recruiting the people needed to conduct contact tracing, which Britain abandoned during the early weeks of the epidemic. Labour leader Keir Starmer said the government had moved too slowly on testing and had failed to take up offers from British companies to provide badly needed protective equipment.

“Something is going wrong, and there is a pattern emerging here. We were slow into lockdown, slow on testing, slow on protective equipment and now slow to take up those offers from British firms,” he said.