Britain is hoping to delay any possible outbreak of coronavirus in order to prepare the NHS if it cannot be contained, the chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, has said.

“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 … is a big advantage,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Quick guide What are coronavirus symptoms and should I go to a doctor? Show Hide What is Covid-19? Covid-19 is caused by a member of the coronavirus family that has never been encountered before. Like other coronaviruses, it has come from animals. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared it a pandemic. What are the symptoms this coronavirus causes? According to the WHO, the most common symptoms of Covid-19 are fever, tiredness and a dry cough. Some patients may also have a runny nose, sore throat, nasal congestion and aches and pains or diarrhoea. Some people report losing their sense of taste and/or smell. About 80% of people who get Covid-19 experience a mild case – about as serious as a regular cold – and recover without needing any special treatment. About one in six people, the WHO says, become seriously ill. The elderly and people with underlying medical problems like high blood pressure, heart problems or diabetes, or chronic respiratory conditions, are at a greater risk of serious illness from Covid-19. In the UK, the National health Service (NHS) has identified the specific symptoms to look for as experiencing either: a high temperature - you feel hot to touch on your chest or back

a new continuous cough - this means you’ve started coughing repeatedly As this is viral pneumonia, antibiotics are of no use. The antiviral drugs we have against flu will not work, and there is currently no vaccine. Recovery depends on the strength of the immune system. Should I go to the doctor if I have a cough? Medical advice varies around the world - with many countries imposing travel bans and lockdowns to try and prevent the spread of the virus. In many place people are being told to stay at home rather than visit a doctor of hospital in person. Check with your local authorities. In the UK, NHS advice is that anyone with symptoms should stay at home for at least 7 days. If you live with other people, they should stay at home for at least 14 days, to avoid spreading the infection outside the home.

But he added that the country should not rely on the change of the seasons coming to the rescue “in any way”, adding that a four-point tactical plan was in place for the UK.

“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,” he said.

He said that the future prevalence of coronavirus was heavily dependent on what happened in China and that currently the situation could go “one of two ways.”

“The first way is that China gets on top of the epidemic … and that there are spillover cases all over the world 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,” 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 then it is going to come to a situation where we have it in the EU, and in the UK.”

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. “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.”

But he added that work had to be focused on containing the virus and delaying its spread as any drugs were only likely to be useful for a minority of people, as most who caught the virus would have few or no symptoms.

Whitty said that people in the UK should not be changing their behaviour but taking sensible precautions to avoid getting any virus, such as covering their mouths with a handkerchief or tissue when sneezing or coughing and throwing used tissues away safely.

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On the Today programme on Wednesday, Prof Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease expert from Imperial College London, said he thought new cases of the virus could still arise and the world was in the “early phases of a global pandemic”. He estimated about 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.

“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,” he said. It was wrong to speculate on any potential death toll figures, he said. “It is 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.”

While he said it was possible that “an epidemic is rolling our way”, Whitty said he would only talk about the potential number of people who could be affected when the facts were clear. Commenting on the figures that came out of China on Thursday, which rose sharply after authorities changed the way they calculate the figures, Whitty said 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”.