El Chief Medical Officer del Reino Unido, Chris Whitty, habla mucho más claro que nuestras autoridades, que repiten incesantemente ese mensaje vacuo de "todo va bien, estamos preparados, somos la caña":
The chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty has told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the UK has a four stage preparation plan, and while containment of Coronavirus is the current aim the country is also preparing to delay the onset of an outbreak of the virus.
“Delay is the next stage of what we need to do,” he said. “Because if we are going to get an outbreak here in the UK, and it is an if not a when, putting it back in time into the summer away from the winter pressures on the NHS, buying us a bit more time to understand the virus better and possibly gives us a seasonal advantage is a big advantage.”
He said that the future prevalence of coronavirus was heavily dependent on what happened in China.
“Broadly this goes on of two ways. The first way is that China gets on top of the epidemic [...] and that there are spill over cases over the worlds but those are contained and we will have cases in the UK, that is highly likely, we may even get a bit of onward transmission in the UK and then the epidemic goes away. That is possible. The two things that may do that are the extraordinary efforts of the Chinese government and possibly a change in the seasons,” he said.
“The alternative is this is not possible to contain in China and then this starts to spread, probably initially quite slowly around the world and at that point unless the seasons come to our rescue the it is going to come to a situation where we have it in the EU, and in the UK. “
But he added that we shouldn’t rely on the change of the seasons coming to the UK’s rescue “in any way”.
“At this point in time [..] we have a strategy that relies on four tactical aims. The first is to contain, the second is to delay, the third is to do the science and the research and the fourth is to mitigate so that we can actually brace the NHS.”
Asked about the new case in London, Whitty said that officials were not in touch with everyone who had been on the same plane as the person who is now confirmed to have the virus, just those who had been in close proximity. Further infection of people who were outside that vicinity was unlikely, he added.
Whitty added that finding a vaccine in the short term was unlikely and impractical, suggesting that work on exploring the use of anti-viral drugs was a better focus.
People talk about vaccines, it will in my view be a long while until we have a vaccine that is ready to deploy but we need to get on with that,” he said.
Asked about the use of anti-viral drugs he added:
“We need to look at existing drugs, like existing HIV drugs, and the Chinese are starting to do this, and test if the existing drugs work against this virus. Some may, some may not.
Biggest thing we have to do is around isolation and delay and trying to work out the patterns of that.
A large proportion having relatively mild disease, drugs are only likely to be useful for a minority [...] There is clearly a lot of research we are having to do at the moment.”
Whitty said that people in the UK should not be changing their behaviour but taking sensible precautions to avoid getting any virus.
All the things that are going to make it more difficult to transmit this virus are good and sensible things we need to do to stop the transmission of any virus,” he said. Remember in the UK, roughly 8,000 people in the UK die of flu.
People should be covering their mouths when they sneeze, disposing of handkerchiefs.
What we should be doing is taking sensible precautions, we would normally take in the winter season.”
On the Today programme yesterday Professor Neil Ferguson, infectious disease expert from Imperial College London, said he thought new cases of the virus could still rise and the world was in the “early phases of a global pandemic”. On his estimation around 60% of the UK population in such a situation could be affected, which if the mortality rate was 1% could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
But Whitty said it was unhelpful to speculate on numbers without strong evidence. He said the fourth strand of the UK coronavirus plan was mitigation, and ensuring the NHS was able to cope.
“This epidemic, where it to happen, we don’t know where the peak would be and absolutely critically we don’t know the proportion of people who have this disease without symptoms. Until we do [know] we really only have a best estimate,” he said.
“The best estimate for the number of people dying at the top end of the range is about 2%, in my view it could be considerably less than that, but we have to prepare for the worst.”
Asked about a potential death toll , Whitty said:
I think it’s a mistake to use numbers which are entirely speculative [...] At the moment the numbers we are seeing out of China are so variable that it is really difficult to put a fixed figure.
If it looks like there is an epidemic rolling our way, which is possible, I would be delighted to come back and talk about real numbers instead of speculative numbers.
Whitty said that it it was very difficult for China to deal with the outbreak and any irregularity in the numbers coming out of the country were not “deliberately misleading” but instead the “reality is taking a long time to catch up with the facts”.