One of Britain's most senior scientific figures has warned that stopping the spread of Covid-19 through public health measures is vital to controlling the Pandemic.
On the eve of the second anniversary of the UK's Covid response, the director of the Wellcome Trust called for investment in next-generation vaccines and better access to vaccinations for poorer countries.
Several of the UK's mostEminent scientists praised the extraordinary response to the Pandemic by the clinicians, researchers and business leaders. Measures such as masks and social distancing are important with Covid infections and hospital admissions rising across the UK.
The progress made by researchers over the last two years has been remarkable, from delivering vaccines and treatments in record time, to the hard work ofgenomics tracking the spread of the virus and identifying new variants.
Focus now needs to be on maintaining key public health interventions alongside vaccines, and developing and ensuring equitable access to new treatments and strengthening the supply chains for PPE and oxygen. The constant and unsustainable cycle of reacting to new variant will be broken if the spread is stopped.
One of the country's most renowned scientists said Britain's universities and private laboratories should be given permanent roles in testing hospital and care home staff in the event of a swine flu epidemic.
The director of the Francis Crick Institute, Paul Nurse, said that the failure to harness the equipment and lab expertise of workers willing to offer public service meant that testing capacity took far longer than necessary to set up.
He said there was no imaginative thinking about how to get testing done quickly.
We can't keep big commercial labs running like this for the next 10 years or so, waiting for the next outbreak of a disease. We don't have a sustainable system in place. In an emergency, you could use public service and identify a range of institutions around the country, universities and publicly funded research places.
The most likely candidates for the next Pandemic should be given vaccines now, according to a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
He said that one way to help reduce the chances of having to impose very harsh measures on everyone is to improve our surveillance. We need to invest in vaccine platforms and develop vaccines against a range of currently rare diseases so that we can adapt them quickly should we need to.
The seven-day average for UK hospital admissions related to Covid rose above 1,700 last week, with more than half being admitted directly because of Covid. According to the Office for National Statistics, nearly 5% of people in England had Covid in the week ending 12 March. In a seven day period earlier this month, nearly a quarter of ambulances in England faced a delay of more than 30 minutes before being able to hand over patients.
The biggest lesson from this is to act early and globally to prevent problems from getting bigger.
Preparing for all possible scenarios when dealing with an unpredictable virus is what this means. Nearly two years after the first lockdown began, at least 185,000 people have died with Covid on their death certificate. Almost half of the UK population has received at least three doses of the vaccine created by scientists and pharmaceutical companies around the world.
After the public health laboratory system in the UK was allowed to run down, a network of Lighthouse labs was built, most of which were used to conduct virus tests. The Lighthouse labs are being shut down as part of the government's plan.
The institutions that helped advise the government on how to deal with the virus are gone.
Funding for many of the research projects that it relied on, such as Imperial College London's React-1 survey of infection prevalence, has ended, as well as the fact that it was made up of some of the most prestigious academics in the UK.
Three months after it was established, the Recovery trial found that dexamethasone reduced the chances of death for the sickest patients, and has since established the effectiveness of three other treatments.
Sir Martin Landray, Recovery's joint chief investigator and professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford Population Health, wouldn't have thought it possible to enroll the first patient in nine days.
Landray hoped the progress in how research is conducted would continue. Recovery was integrated into the routine care being delivered in our hospitals, and there was a commitment to act quickly and reduce bureaucracy.
It could herald a new age for research if policy-makers invest in it.
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