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Dr Susan Hopkins, a deputy director of Public Health England and the medical adviser to NHS Test and Trace, gave a series of media interviews this morning. Here are the main points.
The minimum we’ll see a lockdown throughout this period is four weeks. The reason for that is that we are going to have a slowdown, hopefully, over the next two weeks, in the number of cases, but we really need to bring the caseload down much lower than we have right now in order to protect the NHS over the December/January period.
We don’t know exactly.
We do know that the majority of children have infection that’s related to infection in their households, which is clearly the most likely place that children will get infected.
Firstly, the teams make every effort to call individuals. We do need to get people’s contact details from the primary case.
Usually, about one in five individuals, there’s no contact details given. So we struggle to find that individual and then cases through the system.
Douglas Ross, the new Scottish Conservative leader, told the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland programme, that it was a mistake for Boris Johnson to rule out a second lockdown. Ross said:
I’ve said that I don’t think anything should have been ruled out and it probably was a mistake of the prime minister to rule out a national lockdown, because if this virus has shown us anything it’s that you can’t rule anything out given the way it develops and how cases can go up and come back down again.
