The UK's social distancing measures are working and mean coronavirus now "has nowhere to go and will burn out", a former World Health Organization director has said.

While estimates previously indicated each person infected with COVID-19 would infect 2.6 other people, research conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine revealed that number has fallen to 0.62.

Keeping that figure below one is seen as crucial in the effort to slowly eradicate coronavirus, and Professor Karol Sikora suggested the new study showed the nationwide lockdown was on the way to halting its spread.

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"This means the virus is cornered," he said.

"It has nowhere to go and will burn out. Good news."


Experts suggest the virus's peak in the country will occur between 6 April and 30 April, ahead of a likely second wave when social distancing measures are relaxed.

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Professor Sikora, who is chief medical officer at Rutherford Health, professor of medicine at the University of Buckingham and former director of the WHO Cancer Programme, said evidence from China and South Korea told Sky News he believed the "main wave" of high death-rates would be over by the end of the month.

"The real question is 'how do you relax social distancing at that point?', and there's no science behind that, it's just a judgement call and it's a difficult judgement call," he told Sky News.

"Testing, for those who have been infected and therefore to know what percentage of the population in the UK are infected with the virus is sort of critical now, because that would guide the relaxation of social distancing and help business to get started again."

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He pointed out that studies of restricted samples of people infected with coronavirus, including those on cruise ships, indicated that around half of those who contract the illness have no symptoms.

"That's telling us something," he said.

"Somehow, if we could test the population and find out who exactly has gone through the process of coronavirus, then you can release them into the population.

"If it's 40% or 50% - and the epedemiologists argue about that already - it may be possible to liberate social distancing [in the] first [or] second week in May.

"We'd all be delighted if that is the case. At the same time, if it's not the case and, say, only 10% of the population have been infected, we may have to wait until September, and that would create huge social problems for this country and other countries."