LONDON: The decision to end COVID tests and isolating periods in England could result in the rapid growth of the epidemic because people’s behavior changes faster than it did at other periods of the coronavirus pandemic, the government’s advisers stated in a report released on Friday.
Premier Boris Johnson will outline his plans for people living with COVID on Monday. He has announced that he plans to abolish the lawful requirement for self-isolation for those who are positive for coronavirus.
Health professionals have urged the president not to get too enthusiastic, with a poll that found that most people believed that it was not appropriate to scrap the self-isolation requirement or end the free testing.
The advisory pandemic modeling SPI-M-O group echoed the caution of easing the rules even further.
“While behavior change following the lifting of restrictions has previously been gradual, a sudden change, such as an end to testing and isolation, has the scope to lead to a return to rapid epidemic growth,” SPI-M -O stated in a statement dating February. 2.
The document was released this Friday. It cited studies carried out by Warwick University. The University of Warwick.
The Warwick estimates indicated that a combination of precautions and behavioral changes since before the pandemic, including testing, self-isolation, and mask wear, had reduced the risk of transmission by 20 to 45 percent.
The research suggests the potential for transmission to increase by 25%-80% if the population was to return to pre-pandemic levels without measures to reduce the risk.
Britain has seen 160,000 deaths due to COVID-19; however, Johnson has lifted lockdown restrictions because of vaccination. The lower degree of the Omicron variant has broken the connection between deaths and cases.
SPI-M O said that the waning of immunity and the introduction of new variants could cause an increase or decrease in transmission. It also noted that the potential growth benefit associated with BA.2 subvariant Omicron could lead to models underestimating the rate of hospitalizations.
In the central scenarios of SPI-M-O that aren’t predictions, hospital admissions weren’t predicted to increase over their highest levels at the beginning of the year.