An infectious disease expert has said the “next few weeks are going to be crucial” for keeping coronavirus infections down as schools reopen.
Dr Mike Tildesley, a member of the Government’s SPI-M modelling advisory panel, told Times Radio that children going back to classrooms would cause a rise in the reproductive number – or R value – of the virus while more vaccinations would cause it to reduce.
He said: “We do need to get this balancing act correct and we need to open up at the rate of vaccinations and keep the R number in check, as it were.
“Definitely things are moving in the right direction but the next few weeks are going to be crucial for us to monitor what happens when schools open.
“Hopefully we can keep everything down and most importantly we can prevent seeing a rise in hospitalisations.”
Dr Tildelsey said parents need to keep social distancing and following other rules while dropping their children off at school.
He said: “Just because you’re not in the home with your young children don’t use it as an excuse to go out and mix with other people that you otherwise wouldn’t have done.
“It’s possible with schools open we can keep the R number below one but if we are going to achieve that we all need to keep following all the other rules.”
He added that falling Covid-19 rates are most likely due to lockdown measures and that the impact of vaccinations “hopefully is yet to come”.
He said: “I think most of the reason the numbers are going in the right direction now is still due to lockdown.
“I think we haven’t quite seen the impact of vaccinations, probably start to come in round about now and having a little bit of an effect, but most of the effect thus far actually is probably the fact we have been under severe restrictions since the start of January.”
