The government’s top scientific advisor has said up to 55,000 people could be infected with coronavirus

Up to 55,000 people could be infected with coronavirus in the UK and 20,000 are expected to die, according to the government’s top scientific officer.

Sir Patrick Vallance said the number of predicted deaths was ‘horrible’ but would still represent a ‘good outcome’ given the amount of people expected to become infected with the deadly disease.

At a Health select committee in the House of Commons, chairman Jeremy Hunt had asked about estimates there will be one fatality for every 1,000 cases, which would mean that there are ‘potentially 55,000 cases’ at present.

Sir Patrick said this was a ‘reasonable ballpark way of looking at it’ based on modelling information, adding ‘it’s not more accurate than that’.


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Asked whether it was hoped that deaths could potentially get below 20,000, Sir Patrick said fewer than this would be considered a ‘good outcome’ in terms of where the government is hoping to get to with containing the epidemic. He added: ‘That’s still horrible, it’s still an enormous number of deaths and an enormous pressure on the health service, and having spent 20 years as an NHS consultant as well as an academic, I know what that looks and feels like.’



However he said the stringent social distancing measures introduced on Monday should ‘have a very significant effect on the peak’ and lead to a reduction in cases and deaths after two to three weeks.

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The chief scientist said he wanted to ramp up testing across the UK in an effort to slow the spread of the disease.

At present, the policy is to test only those in hospital already, or those at a care home or prison infected with the virus. So far, 50,442 people have been tested, of which 48,492 were confirmed negative and 1,950 were confirmed as positive – a jump of almost a third from yesterday’s figures.

Sir Patrick Vallance has warned 55,000 people could already be infected with coronavirus and called for widespread testing

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On Monday England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty insisted that the UK’s testing regimen was robust after the World Health Organisation urged countries to ‘test, test, test’ every suspected case of Covid-19 as it is impossible to ‘fight a fire blindfolded’.

In a move away from that strategy, Sir Patrick said he was now pushing for a big increase in testing, telling MPs ‘The quicker we can get to a true community-based test the better’.

At the moment, there is a capacity to test 4,000 people per day, but the aim is to raise that to 10,000. Sir Patrick suggested that the private sector could play a big part in the testing being ramped up.

Jeremy Hunt, a former health secretary, asked whether Britain could and should follow the example of some Asian countries in using mobile phone tracking to identify movements of people who may have the virus – even though there could be civil liberties implications.

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The chief scientific adviser has called for coronavirus testing to be ramped up in the UK (Picture: Reuters)

Sir Patrick said that approach would have made ‘total sense’ back in January, when the disease first emerged, and may well yet come back into play at a later stage. He said people are working ‘very, very hard’ in the UK and elsewhere in developing that idea.

The new figures come after the government ramped up measures to stop the spread of the disease even further today, with Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab advising against non-essential travel to anywhere in the world.

The government’s strategy has changed dramatically over the last 24 hours, after the UK’s top scientists, the World Health Organisation and even members within Boris Johnson’s own party said the country needed to do more to stop the spread of the disease.

Sir Patrick said there is a ‘semantic difference’ to argue whether the UK had shifted from a process of delaying and mitigating the spread of Covid-19 to an attempt to suppress it. He told MPs the approach had always been to ‘save lives and protect the vulnerable’ by delaying and suppressing the peak of the outbreak and shielding those most likely to be badly hit.



The UK’s new lockdown measures come days after Italy, Spain, France, Denamark and a string of other virus-hit countries across Europe placed restrictions on people’s movement.

Brits have been warned that the health crisis could go one for months. Answering a question of what would happen when suppression measures are lifted, Sir Patrick said ‘that’s one of the big unknowns in this which we are going to have to think about very carefully’.

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