Professor Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, has said that global case numbers “are the tip of the iceberg” and “we are in the early phases of a global pandemic”. He believes that, because current surveillance is focused on travellers rather than local transmissions, authorities are only picking up one in three cases coming into the UK.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Mr Ferguson estimated that transmissions will rise in the UK in the next few weeks and peak two or three months after that. If it truly establishes itself, in terms of community person to person transmission, it will behave a lot like a flu pandemic, with maybe up to 60 per cent of the population getting infected. But most of those people having very, very mild symptoms.
John Oxford, emeritus professor of virology at Queen Mary, University of London, said that he is not looking towards a vaccine, due to how long that will take to develop. Instead, he suggested restricting social actions with less hand-shaking, hugging and kissing, as he thinks it is likely spread by “ordinary tidal breathing”. Mr Oxford suggested that the international community could “grapple with this illness” but said it should have developed a vaccine in 2003 after the Sars outbreak.