Every Monday we’ll answer your questions on Covid-19 and health in a feature published online. You can submit a question here.
This week, HuffPost
UK reader Simon asked: When will distancing be dropped completely?
Boris Johnson hinted in July that the UK could scrap the one-metre social distancing rule by November – sparking hope among those who’ve gone for months without being able to hug loved ones... or have sex.
“We hope by November at the earliest we can continue to make progress in our struggle against the virus,” said the prime minister. “It may conceivably be possible to move away from social distancing measures.”
As it stands, people in most parts of the UK are still meant to be social distancing when interacting with people outside of their household – this doesn’t apply to those who’ve formed a bubble with another household.
The question of when distanced will be dropped completely isn’t an easy one to answer, but when do experts think these measures may be able to (safely) end?Submit a
Coronavirus health question to HuffPost UK.Related... Coronavirus Is A Minefield. We’ll Help You Understand It. Professor Rowland Kao, an expert in veterinary epidemiology and data science at the University of Edinburgh, says there’s “considerable difficulty” in making a prediction of how long social distancing measures will last.
Scrapping distancing depends on a combination of how much the 1m rule influences the R number, and whether or not other measures can be kept or put in place to keep the R number down, he says.The R number – sometimes referred to as the R0 – is the “basic reproduction number”. It’s used to measure the transmission potential of a disease and represents the number of people one infected person will, on average, pass the virus on to.
Another key factor is whether the number of new cases is low enough, so that any additional rise in cases due to the removal of social distancing can be contained by good test, track and trace – without putting too much stress on the NHS, says Prof Kao. For this, we need a track and trace system that works. Trials of a contact tracing app are currently under way.Related... What Is The R Number? And How Is It Different To The K Number? During winter, it’s unlikely we’ll see social distancing ease as there’s a greater risk of transmission of respiratory illness (like flu and Covid-19) when people spend more time indoors.
“As we are entering a period of increasing risks, we don’t yet have the relevant evidence to safely answer any of these questions,” he says, “especially as we attempt to manage this balance between Covid-19 controls and the necessary and important return to more normal working and living conditions.”
“Most importantly,” Prof Kao adds, “limiting the number of times local areas – or indeed, the entire country – must increase measures (such as entering lockdown) has to be a high priority.”
In a perfect world, experts would like to see no new active infections before scrapping social distancing in
England, Wales,
Scotland and Northern
Ireland.
But we’re still averaging 1,000 daily lab-confirmed cases – and the actual figure is likely to be far higher. Professor David Hunter, an expert in epidemiology and medicine at University of Oxford, previously told HuffPost UK the mode of detection unearths one in five of the actual cases out there. So realistically, new infections may be nearer 5,000 cases a day. Quite far off the desired ‘zero’.Related... How Likely Is A Second Wave – And Can It Be Prevented? Professor John Edmunds, an expert from the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases at
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, believes we’ll be under distancing restrictions until there’s high enough levels of immunity in the population for this to be unnecessary.
Because incidence will (hopefully) be kept at a relatively low level in the future – due to local lockdown measures and track and trace – immunity generated by natural infection is “not likely to play a major role in achieving the high level of population immunity necessary to break chains of transmission,” he says. So, we need a vaccine to achieve this level of immunity.
“That means we will remain with some social distance measures in place until a safe and effective vaccine is found, mass-produced and delivered to the population,” he says.
With this in mind, November seems like a long shot – especially as news on the UK’s vaccine efforts has gone particularly quiet. The latest is that the UK government has placed orders for six different experimental vaccines, however we don’t yet know if any of them actually work.Related... Am I Immune To Covid-19 – And How Would I Know? Some countries have managed to lift social distancing restrictions – however, they offer a cautionary tale that when such restrictions are eased, it’s not necessarily a done deal.
At the start of June,
New Zealand lifted all social distancing measures as the country reported zero new active cases of Covid-19, but it has since had to reinstate the measures due to an outbreak in Auckland.
In the UK, the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey and the Isle of Man have scrapped social distancing. They eased such measures in June after a period of reporting no new infections. Residents were able to hug and kiss each other again, however travel and quarantine restrictions remain to stop infections from rising again if residents go on holiday. Other questions we've answered... Can You Catch Covid-19 In A Swimming Pool? The Science Behind Why Singing Could Spread Coronavirus Should You Wear A Face Shield Against Covid-19? We Asked The Experts