“What we are going to see is cases are going to go up”: Professor Devi Sridhar on the UK’s response to coronavirus
by Ian Sinclair
19 May 2020
Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, appeared on BBC Question Time on 14 May 2020. She had a number of criticisms of the UK government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak:
On lifting the lockdown: “I just think it is quite tragic we are in this situation. This issue about safety… could have been dealt with many weeks ago. Other countries have stayed open, they have stayed safe by actually having public health infrastructure in place to actually detect who had the virus that when you do travel you know you that actually you are not going to be exposing others. That actually we know who had the virus and who doesn’t, and we can make sure they are isolated. Listening to this debate, is it safe currently to go on public transport? I don’t think so. Is it safe to open schools? I don’t think so. Because we don’t have in place the basic building blocks of surveillance to actually know who has the virus. And if the lockdown starts opening up now before we have the infrastructure in place, it’s basically pointless. In the sense actually you should use the time to build the infrastructure that actually when you lift lockdown then you are in a better position than you were when you went in. And the thing I am trying to get my head around is in the past eight weeks that we have been in a lockdown which is costly, that has proved very drastic in terms of the economic and social effects, aswell as the effects on the non-essential services in the NHS, what has fundamentally changed in the past eight weeks to put us in a better position to open up? So what we are going to see is cases are going to go up… the virus is going to continue spreading and in a few weeks we are going to have this exact same debate again.”
On the economy vs. public health: “We keep putting the economy versus public health, and I think that is a mistake. These are both on the same side. Containment is good for the public health, it is good for the economy. That is what we are seeing from the countries that moved early, that locked down fast and that actually took the drastic measures, contained the virus, and then are able to open up now. And I think having these kinds of debates in February and March is what has created such confusion. So what is the government’s strategy? Is it to let the virus run through, try to stay within NHS capacity and basically think that is going to save the economy? We are learning that is not the right way. The right way is actually to get on top of this virus aggressively. We have to stay in lockdown longer. Stay in lockdown longer, do it right, ease it and it is a one way street. Right now the problem we are going to face is if we open it is not like the virus magically disappears. It is still going to be around. So what that means is it is going to continue spreading and at some point NHS capacity is going to be strained. We have already lost 60,000 people. I guess we are maybe 10 percent of the way through this if we are fortunate? We will find out soon. We have a long way to go.”
On testing: “A clear way to figure out how on top of it you are is through testing. So if you are testing people and less than two percent are positive, you know you are in pretty good shape. This is where South Korea and New Zealand are. If you are testing people and it is around five percent then you know you barely have a handle on it. If it is over 10 percent you have a huge problem. We are finding we are over 10 percent. And, of course, this leads to the question: where is this virus?”
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