Ross Clark

Test, track and trace is an integral – and very expensive – part of the government’s plans for lifting lockdown and getting the country back to normal. The government is trying to hire 25,000 contract-tracers to augment an app-based system which seems mysteriously to have all-but vanished from its plans. But could there be a cheaper way of gaining advanced warning of infection in an area, allowing localised lockdowns to be imposed? Whatever happened to RNA levels in sewage was followed very closely three days later in hospital admissions A study led by Jordan Peccia at Yale University raises the possibility of an intriguing early warning system for Covid outbreaks.

It has been clear from the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic that there is a very steep age profile to its victims: with few children and teenagers experiencing serious symptoms while their grandparents suffer a high death toll. But what about the numbers of people infected? Two studies, in Britain and Sweden, appear to show that when it comes to infections, as opposed to deaths and hospitalisations, there is an inverse profile, with young people are contracting Covid-19 at a higher rate than the elderly. This week, Public Health England (PHE) announced initial results of the antibody tests which should help us solve the great unknown: just how many of us have had Covid-19, whether we experienced symptoms or not?

Could the Government be about to relax the two-metre rule for social distancing? On Wednesday morning, professor Robert Dingwall, a sociologist who sits on the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, questioned the rule, saying he had tried to trace the scientific justification for it but couldn’t. The evidence, he said, was ‘fragile’. Some countries, such as the US and Spain, have also set a distance of two metres but others, such as Australia, Germany and the Netherlands are content with 1.5 metres and others, such as Norway and Finland are happy with a single metre. The two-metre rule is going to be a huge impediment to relaxing lockdown. As an example, a standard train carriage in Britain is 2.8 metres wide.

Aside from a handful of anti-vaxxers, virtually everyone would leap at the prospect of a vaccine earning us an early exit from the Covid-19 crisis. The only snag is that we do not have a vaccine that is proven to work, let alone safe to use, and that it is improbable that we will have one for some time. On 22 April, the Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty said the chances of a vaccine being ready within the next year are ‘incredibly small’. And he seems to be on the optimistic side. In the US, Anthony Fauci has suggested 12 to 18 months at the minimum and former federal vaccine scientist Rick Bright told the Senate last week that even 18 months is an ‘aggressive timetable’.

Could having a common cold protect you against Covid-19? The intriguing prospect has been raised by a team from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. They were researching the response of human T cells – which play a vital role in the immune system – in patients who have recovered from Covid-19. The response they detected, however, also showed up in 40 to 60 per cent of a control group that had not been exposed to Covid-19. In a paper published in the journal Cell they write: 'This may be reflective of some degree of crossreactive, pre-existing immunity to Sars-CoV-2 in some, but not all, individuals'. Sars-CoV-2 is the virus which causes Covid-19.

The Israeli government is reporting this morning that the country’s Institute for Biological Research has made a breakthrough in the development of a potential treatment against SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19. Scientists there have isolated a ‘monoclonal neutralising antibody’ which could potentially neutralise the virus after infection. The antibody was obtained from the blood of an infected patient. It is called monoclonal because it is generated from a single cell – which could allow vast quantities of the antibody to be produced quickly. Is it the breakthrough that could make all the difference? Treatment of novel viruses with monoclonal neutralising antibodies has been under development for some time, notably for Ebola, SARS and MERS.

Since mid-March there has been an assumption that herd immunity against Covid-19 would not be achieved until around 60 per cent of the population has been infected. It is a figure which gave rise to the now-famous paper by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, which claimed that a herd immunity policy (which the government denies ever following) would result in the deaths of 250,000 people in Britain. That figure has been challenged by scientists who have questioned some of the assumptions behind it – for example, it assumed a mortality rate of 0.9 per cent which Imperial College itself has since revised downwards to 0.66 per cent, and some believe is lower still. But today comes another challenge.