UK cases of coronavirus WILL keep rising, warns Chief Medical Office Chris Whitty

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UK cases of coronavirus WILL keep rising and infections are taking place between Britons, warns Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty as he says the focus is now on delaying the spread

By James Tapsfield, Political Editor For Mailonline

Published: | Updated:

UK cases will keep rising and infections are taking place between Britons, Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said today.

Prof Whitty said hopes of containing the virus largely in its origin site in China were ‘slim to zero’.

He warned ‘community transmission’ was happening in the UK, and the government’s focus had moved from the ‘contain’ phase to focus on efforts to ‘delay’ the spread.

He also raised the possibility that in a bad scenario there could be a ‘huge number’ of cases needing hospital treatment, ‘overtopping the ability of the NHS realistically to put everybody in beds’. 

Giving evidence to the Health Select Committee, Prof Whitty said: ‘I’m expecting the number only to go up. 

‘There are now several – not large numbers – but several cases where we cannot see where this has come from in terms of a clear transmission, either because someone has come directly from overseas or because they’ve had a close contact with someone who has recently returned from overseas.

‘That I think makes it highly likely therefore that there is some level of community transmission of this virus in the UK now.’ 

Giving evidence to the Health Select Committee, Prof Chris Whitty said: ‘I’m expecting the number only to go up.’

Prof Whitty warned 'community transmission' was happening in the UK, and the government's focus had moved from the 'contain' phase to focus on efforts to 'delay' the spread.

Prof Whitty warned ‘community transmission’ was happening in the UK, and the government’s focus had moved from the ‘contain’ phase to focus on efforts to ‘delay’ the spread.

He added: ‘It is here at very low levels at this point in time, but that should be the working assumption on which we go forward. 

Asked by chairman Jeremy Hunt whether the government had shifted its focus fro ‘contain’ to ‘delay’, Prof Whitty said: We are now basically mainly delay.’ 

There are now 90 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK after Scotland declared three more.

Overall, current figures show 80 cases in England, six in Scotland, one in Wales and three in Northern Ireland.

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), which is chaired by the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, is also meeting on Thursday to discuss the situation.

In other key developments today:

  • Health Minister Edward Argar said the Government is awaiting the advice of Prof Whitty before moving from the current containment phase to the delay phase of tackling the virus.
  • ITV revealed travel companies are deferring their TV advertising because of the disease, with advertising revenue due to drop 10 per cent in April.
  • Europe’s largest regional airline Flybe has collapsed into administration, with sources saying coronavirus ‘made a difficult situation worse’.
  • The Grand Princess cruise ship, with around 2,500 passengers and 1,000 crew, is being held off the coast of California after a former passenger died from Covid-19.
  • Kings College Hospital in south London, confirmed two recent patients had tested positive for Covid-19, with some staff told to self-isolate. 

Prof Whitty told MPs it had initially been hoped that the virus could have been contained mainly within China with a few outbreaks elsewhere and once the authorities got on top of it the Covid-19 would go away.

But, he said: ‘That is becoming an extraordinarily unlikely long-term outcome.

ITV warns adverts are being pulled over coronavirus fears 

ITV has warned that its advertising revenues are being hit by the outbreak of coronavirus as travel companies pull their ads from TV.

The broadcaster said it has already felt the pinch in March, and is expecting a 10% drop in ad revenue in April.

It comes as the company reported a 1.5% drop in full-year advertising revenue in 2019, although that is better than the 2% fall it had previously forecast.

Pre-tax profit fell by 7% to £530 million, on revenue of £3.9 billion, up 3%.

ITV said it is too early to tell how big the overall impact of coronavirus will be.

It still expects ad revenue to grow by 2% in the first three months of the year; however this does not include April.

The disease has spread around the world since it was first discovered in China late last year. Almost 100,000 people are now thought to have been infected, with several thousand deaths reported.

‘We are not completely there and it is important to acknowledge that for ‘contain’ we need to have an international view about what we do about this.

‘This is something which we should, in a sense, take the views of other nations as well as our own.

‘But I think we need to be realistic about the fact that with so many different outbreaks, containing looks pretty optimistic.’

He said the delay phase was aimed at pushing back the peak of the epidemic.

That could move the peak of cases away from the ‘winter pressures on the NHS in all four nations of the UK’.

It would also allow more time for research into the nature of the Covid-19 virus and, thirdly, there was a possibility that – as with flu and colds – there could be a seasonal element which meant the rate of transmission went down.

Prof Whitty said there would not be a ‘step move’ from the contain phase to the delay phase but ‘we are putting greater and greater priority on the elements of this which are delay’.

‘For the early stages of delay, contain and delay are very similar, not quite the same. They are largely around finding early cases, isolating them, following their chains of transmission, where necessary isolating those people,’ he said.

But as time goes by there would be measures that involved ‘changes to society’, he said.