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Professor Neil Ferguson from Imperial College London, one of the lead authors on a paper which predicted around 250,000 people could die if the UK did not switch tactics, has said he has symptoms of Covid-19.

He tweeted: “Sigh. Developed a slight dry but persistent cough yesterday and self isolated even though I felt fine. Then developed high fever at 4am today. There is a lot of COVID-19 in Westminster.”

Prof Ferguson was lead author of a report saying the UK had no choice but to change tactics in the face of a growing coronavirus crisis.

A research paper by the team said the “surge limits” for both general ward and intensive care beds would be exceeded by at least eight-fold.

“In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB (Great Britain), and 1.1-1.2 million in the US,” it said.

In the study, the team assessed three strategies, the first of which is suppression, which has been adopted in China and slows down transmission to very low levels.

They also looked at mitigation, where governments accept that Covid-19 will spread and work is done to slow it down and prevent a huge peak in cases that would overwhelm the health service.

The third strategy is doing nothing and letting the virus rip through the population, running its course, which no country has adopted.

The paper looked specifically at scenarios in the UK and the US, and concluded that suppression was the only answer.

It said mitigation policies (combining home isolation of suspected cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspected cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease) “might reduce peak healthcare demand by two-thirds and deaths by half”.

“However, the resulting mitigated epidemic would still likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over.

“For countries able to achieve it, this leaves suppression as the preferred policy option.”

However, the paper warns that suppression would ideally need to continue until a vaccine is developed, which could be 18 months or more.

The scientists warned: “We predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed.”

The experts said governments would need to relax suppression tactics “in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound.”

The modelling in the paper works on the assumption that 30% of people admitted to hospital will require critical care including ventilation and 50% of those in critical care will die.

Professor Neil Ferguson, one of the lead authors on the study, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the latest work came after a “refinement of estimates”.

He said the information gathered in recent weeks showed it had “become increasingly clear” that predicted deaths were not the worst-case scenario, they were the “most likely”.

The measures announced in previous weeks by the Government are still important, but we need to go “much further” in suppressing the virus, he said.

He said scientists had “struggled to see if there was a different way of managing this epidemic” in a way that was acceptable not just in terms of death but in terms of social disruption, but had concluded that suppression was necessary.