Transcript
Interviewer: How well are we doing at detecting the virus?
I think case numbers are the tip of the iceberg, particularly in China where they are only detecting probably 5% of cases - the most severe - so i think it is misleading to look at the Chinese case numbers effectively they’re just looking at the epidemic in Hubei and Wuhan Provence. Outside that province they are only reporting cases that have a link to Wuhan since they sealed the city two weeks ago it is unsurprising that cases are going down.
I think were in the early phases of a global pandemic at the moment. Singapore is seeing local transmission. The fact hat we’ve only reported 8 cases in this country is just because again our surveillance is focussed on travellers. We think probably we’re picking up maybe one in three cases at the current time.
We will know more in the next few weeks when surveillance is started in hospitals across the UK of pneumonia cases. That will give us a proper picture. I think the sort of measures John Oxford talked about may have some potential to slow spread down and move us out of the flu season, release NHS pressures a bit, but i think it is highly unlikely that will stop transmission of this virus.
Interviewer: And when you talked about local transmission can you explain exactly what that means?
So at the moment we’ve been seeing cases, detecting cases, in travellers, they were infected overseas effectively. When we can be sure transmission has started here we’re getting transmission from person-to-person within the UK in a sustained manner - that’s what we mean by local transmission.
Interviewer: And what about death rates from the disease?
So again the picture in China is somewhat misleading for a number of reasons. They are mostly hospitalising very severe cases and there is a three week delay frombasically when somebody gets ill to when they die, so you have to compare the deaths being seen now with cases three weeks ago so in Wuhan for instance, the cases they are detecting have a mortality of 20% but since that’s the tip of the iceberg the overall mortality rate we think is much lower but still potentially concerning maybe 1% of those getting infected might die but we have a lot of uncertainty around that estimate.
Interviewer: Is it possible to know when this might reach a peak?
So i think at the moment um our best eastimates are really that transmission will really get going in the UK in the next few weeks unless we’re very lucky probably peaking two or three months after that. It has to be bourne in mind the epidemic in Wuhan is peaking at the moment, it’s be going for 3 months since the beginning of December, we have no real idea what’s going on in the rest of China. Hospitals in Beijing apparently are full of pneumonia cases which are not being tested so we have no clear indication of true numbers in China. So that is a planning assumption in the UK. We would all of course like it to be less severe than we’re worrying about but policy has to plan for the worst case, or at least the reasonable worst case, which is what’s going on now.
Interviewer: So what should they be planning for in terms of numbers getting the virus?
If it truly establishes itself in terms of community person-to-person transmission, it will behave actually a lot like a flu pandemic. Maybe about 60% of the population getting infected, but most of those people will have very very mild symptoms.