Top Professor believes ‘national lockdown will happen in two weeks’

A top Professor who is the director of public health in England’s worst hit area is urging the government to impose a three-week national lockdown.

Professor Dominic Harrison, who is the director of public health at Blackburn with Darwen borough council, told the Guardian newspaper that the government’s current approach to the virus is the “worst of all possible outcomes.”

He added, “To put it bluntly, we’re going to need a much harsher set of control measures that look very much more like the first total lockdown, and very much more like what France is doing.”

He said that the government current tier 3 is “highly unlikely” to bring down the growing infection rates across England.

Professor Harrison said he believed that a national lockdown would happen in about a fortnight. 

According to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) more than 560,000 people were confirmed to have had coronavirus last week.

Around one in 100 had the virus between 17 and 23 October, and cases increased to 51,900 each day in England last week.

The government has been told by scientists that every hospital bed in England will be full by 17 December, unless Boris Johnson imposes further restrictions immediately.

A source has said that due to social distancing in hospitals there are fewer beds, which may well lead to people being turned away from having treatment.

Medical and scientific experts are warning that there needs to be a change before Christmas as they estimate almost 100,000 people per day are becoming infected.

They have said that the current measures the government has put in place are “not sufficient” as the pandemic is “growing exponentially.”

Sir Jeremy Farrar, who sits on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), has said the UK “cannot continue to just observe and not act.”

In a tweet, he wrote: “U.K delayed in March resulting one of worst outcomes globally. Sept/Oct we have had all the data, trajectory epidemic clear + experience first wave & other countries.

“Delaying is itself a decision with consequences.”

Professor Steven Riley of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial College London said, “Our data show that there’s absolutely no reason to expect that exponential rise to change to the next few weeks, regardless of what we do, because we’re measuring infections occurring in the community.

‘If we are going to consider at some point over the winter that we may have to do something much more stringent, then it becomes a question of time.

“I think these results do argue for something sooner rather than later.”