Interview: Scientists, politicians part company in COVID-19 battle, says top British expert

LONDON, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Scientists across Europe "feel politicians have headed in a separate direction" in the quest to defeat COVID-19, a leading British immunologist told Xinhua.

"The interface between science, data, and policy has become strained," Professor Danny Altmann, from the Faculty of Medicine in the Department of Immunology and Inflammation at Imperial College, said in a recent email interview.

The weekly infection survey, published on Friday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), estimated that 4.88 million people in Britain had the coronavirus in the week ending April 2.

"The UK currently faces a difficult situation through the triology of a major surge of massively transmissible BA.2, being three months out from an only moderately successful booster campaign, with levels now waning badly," said the professor.

"Policy change has left people confused, being told the pandemic is 'over', yet hospitals, schools and businesses are finding it really hard to function with 1-in-10 off sick," he said.

According to the British government's plan "Living with COVID-19", from the start of April, all COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted in England, with people advised to take precautions in crowded spaces. Free lateral flow testing also came to an end on April 1.

"Living with COVID feels to me like a PR jargon from a policy office, and out of place in modern medicine. We never tell people they simply have to learn to live with HIV, TB or malaria," said Altmann.

Altmann said with current levels of COVID-19 infection and with high levels of sick leave among health staff, the situation in National Health Service (NHS) hospitals is unworkable, both in terms of COVID-19 care and in terms of recovering from the backlog of the past two years.

"There are actually many pragmatic mitigations that fall short of lockdowns, from a strong testing and isolation policy to legislation on ventilation in schools and workplaces."

According to the most recent analysis of the UK Health Security Agency, Omicron BA.2 continues to demonstrate a substantial growth advantage in Britain. The Omicron subvariant is now estimated to account for approximately 93.7 percent of cases in England.

"The COVID landscape has effectively changed with changing properties, transmissibility, immune evasion and pathobiology of each successive variant," said Altmann.

"BA.2 is absurdly infectious, the XE variant (a recombinant of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2.) even more so. While the vaccinated are relatively protected from severe disease and death, the current wave comes close to making our past vaccination program obsolete and no longer fit for purpose."

On the question that many people, including politicians, view the current wave of coronavirus as no more than a flu-like illness, Altmann told Xinhua: "The debate needs to move along and is different to the stakes as they were two years ago ... yet it's still untenable to have a rampant virus that infects over and over, putting 1-in-10 out of school or work, and perhaps leaving a UK excess-death toll of 50,000 per year."

"It would be good to see flexibility for a return to a more pragmatic, data-led approach. You can't just bluff a virus away by choosing to ignore it," concluded Altmann.