Dr Margaret Harris from the World Health Organisation questions the UK approach (Picture: PA/BBC)

The UK needs to be taking more ‘action’ against the coronavirus epidemic, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.

The current ‘herd immunity’ approach has been called into question with experts saying not enough is known about the virus.

Boris Johnson has come under fire for not immediately banning large-scale gatherings or closing schools to deal with the outbreak.

Instead, he has urged anyone with symptoms to self-isolate and asked the population to thoroughly wash their hands.


The government has also said that isolating the elderly or vulnerable is not logical.

These moves differ significantly from other European countries which have issued tight restrictions on peoples’ movements as the pandemic worsens.

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

The UK is not closing schools for now (Picture: AFP )

WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told BBC Radio 4’s Today: ‘We don’t know enough about the science of this virus, it hasn’t been in our population for long enough for us to know what it does in immunological terms.



‘Every virus functions differently in your body and stimulates a different immunological profile.

‘We can talk theories, but at the moment we are really facing a situation where we have got to look at action.’

The UK is set to ban large gatherings from next week but schools will remain open.

World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared covid-19 a pandemic (Picture: AFP)

WHO said Europe has become the epicentre of the pandemic.

All gatherings have been banned in Belgium, Cyprus and Italy while the Czech Republic has stopped meetings of more than 30 people.

France, the Netherlands, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Romania have banned gatherings of more than 100 people.

Other nations, including Scotland, have stopped more than 500 people being together at once.

Schools have shut in 17 European countries, including the Republic of Ireland.

There are also widespread travel restrictions, including Donald Trump banning entry to the US to all travellers from mainland Europe.

He has now suggested that ban could soon include the UK.

Dr Harris’ words follow on from the WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: ‘You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is.

‘Find, isolate, test and treat every case to break the chains of Covid transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.

‘Do not just let this fire burn.

‘Any country that looks at the experience of other countries with large epidemics and thinks “that won’t happen to us” is making a deadly mistake.’

The UK government wants to flatten the curve of infection (Picture: PA )

The UK government believes the virus will infect the majority of the population and that the peak could still 10 to 14 weeks away.

They are attempting to reduce pressure on the NHS by ‘flattening out the curve’ of the number of infections.

On Friday, the UK’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said it is hoped the Government’s approach to tackling coronavirus will create a ‘herd immunity’ to the disease.

He said: ‘If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time.

‘Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it.



‘Those are the key things we need to do.’

Next week the UK is set to ban large scale gatherings of more than 500 people and give police new powers to detain infected people if they break self-isolation rules.