November 20, 2020

expert comments about COVID-19 and Christmas

A few journalists have asked us what COVID-19 means for Christmas this year, so here a few general comments from scientists.

Dr Julian Tang, Honorary Associate Professor in Respiratory Sciences and Clinical Virologist, University of Leicester, said:

“Very starkly, the virus will inevitably spread over Christmas if there are more frequent contacts, within multigenerational family gatherings, from different households, from different parts of the country, for longer durations, in crowded home environments – this is how the virus spreads, as we have experienced over the past 10 months.

“So if you ‘follow the science’ with the aim of purely suppressing the virus – then a normal Christmas is not a good idea.

“However, there are other recognised serious social, emotional, psychological, risks and needs – especially around Christmas – that also need to be addressed.  So some balance of risks is needed.

“If we can get the R number down towards 1 as much as possible, keep homes as well-ventilated (by opening windows and keeping inside doors open) as we can, protect ‘granny and grandad’ as much as possible within the home – to minimise the risk to those most vulnerable family members, then some sort of ‘limited’ Christmas may possible.

“The evidence seems to suggest primary school-aged grandchildren (<7yrs old) seem to have less risk of becoming infected and may pose less risk of passing on the virus.  But it’s particularly important to try to reduce the amount and duration of contact between the elderly and other family members.

“However, any measures may be adhered to in a highly variable manner during the ‘festive atmosphere’ of any Christmas period if households are allowed to mix.  So unfortunately, there would be some fallout of this, with surges of the virus likely in the New Year.”

Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton, said:

“It will likely be a bad idea to allow multiple households to mix over the Christmas period.  There will still be significant numbers of new cases of COVID-19 per day, and this would unnecessarily expose vulnerable groups.  It may be that a restricted ‘bubble’ could work, with for example two households mixing.  However, even this level of restriction will still pose some risk and we would see higher numbers of cases in January as a result.

“There are precedents from around the world in terms of scaling back large public celebrations and festivals.  Chinese New Year was curtailed when the outbreak emerged in January.  The Hajj usually attracts over 2 million pilgrims into Saudi Arabia but this year was restricted to just 10000 visitors aged between 20 and 50, who were subject to testing.  These measures prevented an estimated 127000 new cases¹.  The Israeli government banned household mixing and inter-city travel during Passover.  And here in the UK, the Eid festivals were also cancelled with little notice.”

1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7409790/

Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine, UEA, said:

“Current levels of infection are changing with the first reasonable signs of a decline in numbers yesterday following lockdown.

“There are a range of things that can be done to reduce risk when people meet, but they depend on a range of factors including whether there are any clinically vulnerable or clinically extremely vulnerable people in the group and how long people will be staying together (is it a couple of hours with granny or three days overnight):

1) Restricting the number of people allowed to meet up – GOOD evidence.

2) Restricting the number of households allowed to meet together – GOOD evidence.

Then a whole range of other things that are less certain but may have value in certain but not all circumstances; wearing face coverings, having a quickie test before meeting up, keep windows open, wash hands, etc.

“I do not know what evidence was used to support the reported “for every one day of relaxation, five days of tighter restrictions would potentially be needed”.  But looking back to April and using hospitalisations as the most reliable indicator, the first day that I have data for (England only) was 19th March with 586 hospitalisations.  Hospitalisations reached a peak of 2743 on the 4th April (15 days later).  It then took till the 24th May for this figure to fall to less than 586 (574 hospitalisations on 24th May) 50 days later so if my maths are correct hospitalisations took about 3.4 times as long to decline as to increase.  Now case numbers were not increasing as rapidly up to this current lockdown as they were in the Spring but also our current lockdown is not as strict and will be less in December and January so probably cases will decline somewhat more slowly.  I suspect that the one to five is based on modelling so may or may not be what is seen when we get to Christmas but it all depends on how free Christmas is allowed to be and what more general restrictions are in place either side by then.  Both of which are currently unknown.  So whether it is five for one is not really knowable yet at least to me.  But what we do know is that cases take longer to decline than they take to increase.”

Prof Brendan Wren, Professor of Vaccinology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said:

“The best Christmas present ever is the promise of a new effective Covid-19 vaccine for everyone.  It would be foolish to spoil this by relaxing measures too far and causing unnecessary deaths.  Time and time again it has been demonstrated worldwide that premature exits from lockdown have fatal consequences and we end up back in lockdown.  This Christmas has to be different as the science shows us that a few days of fun can have dire consequences later on.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.