Welsh Technical Advisory Cell finds “the UK’s lockdown measures were not as successful as those of several other European countries”

The latest technical advice given to Welsh Government has been published, this time on the impact of measures to ease lockdown restrictions on R values.

Welsh Government has published more of the scientific and technical research, and evidence they have received to form a response to the pandemic in Wales.

The latest advice document from the Technical Advisory Cell (TAC) has been published, although public now the document itself is as usual several days old. The Technical Advisory Cell (TAC) is a conduit and interpretation group, interpreting UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) outputs into a Welsh context, relay relevant information and questions from Welsh Government to SAGE as well as feed the information to groups such as Local Resilience Fora.

On Friday the First Minister said the R figure for Wales had dropped from 0.8 to 0.7 .

The document released today says countries in Europe showed a sharp decline in the CV19 infection rate
following lockdown, however “The UK did not show the same sharp drop in infection rate following the lockdown and it has taken longer for the UK to approach levels of infection typical of several European countries.”

“Consequently, it could be concluded the UK’s lockdown measures were not as successful as those of several other European countries, as evidenced further by the larger number of deaths in the UK than any other European country of comparable population size (France, Germany, Italy).”

Encouragingly the report says there has not been a rapid rise in the R figure in many European countries after lockdowns have been eased, however the outcome has been described as a ‘flatline’ of R at or just below 1.

There is concern about the longer term slower rise “Some European countries (e.g. France) show strong hints that the R value might be rising in the most recent time period (up to early June) as a result of unlocking measures, but this needs to be taken with caution because the infection rate is very small and the R value will be disturbed by ‘random noise’.”

The modelling based off R is subject to around 2-3 weeks lag, and therefore the specific impacts on the figure by unlocking specific measures is hard to link, “If more than one unlocking action is taken at one time, it is very difficult to attribute any detrimental change in R value to any one action taken.”

The TAC concludes, “….when unlocking the UK, caution is required when making comparisons with other European countries, so a cautious approach to further unlocking measures would be prudent.”

The full TAC PDF can be found here, which is dated 8th June 2020.