March 11, 2020

expert reaction to news Nadine Dorries has tested positive for COVID-19

Health minister Nadine Dorries has confirmed that she has tested positive for COVID-19.

Dr Bharat Pankhania, Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School, said:

“The example of Nadine Dorries getting infected, developing symptoms and then realising a few days later that she had acquired the coronavirus infection demonstrates the difficulty of controlling the spread of the coronavirus in the community.

“Because there is community transmission of infection in the UK, people need to develop the mindset that they may get exposed to the coronavirus, at any place, any time, anywhere and thus they practice heightened infection control measures and awareness.

“It is good news that testing for the coronavirus is going to be extended to the local labs and hence that will increase capacity.  Private labs, if accredited, may also test for the coronavirus.

“The reassuring message to the public is that just because they may have been a contact of a case, it doesn’t mean they will definitely also get infected.”

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

“It is unfortunate that Nadine Dorries has contracted the coronavirus, this demonstrates that the virus can infect all walks of life.  Although transmission is not always inevitable, contact tracing will take place to determine how she may have caught the virus and who she may have passed it onto.  This may have implications for the operation of parliament.”

Prof Jonathan Ball, Professor of Molecular Virology, University of Nottingham, said:

“It just goes to show that none of us are immune to this virus; literally no one.  As with all these cases, it will be important to understand where this infection came from – whether or not it was from a known high risk area, or part of an unknown community transmission chain.

“Either way, I wish the health minister a speedy recovery.  But it does serve to remind all of us just how well this virus can spread.  That’s why we have to deal with this thing now – in ten days time we might be facing a totally different proposition.”

Prof Martin Hibberd, Professor of Emerging Infectious Disease, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said:

“The transmission of virus from one person to the next is a highly variable process with lots of different factors all having an influence.  While this is still all under active research, experience from other diseases gives us some clues.  These risk factors might include the amount of virus the positive person has in their body at the time, the amount of aerosol they produce (coughing or sneezing) and the amount they leave on surfaces (reduced by hand washing).  The susceptible person is likely at higher risk if they breath in larger amounts of virus from an infected person with symptoms (or ‘touch in’, perhaps via hands touching the face).  Risks influencing this include environmental factors that might concentrate the virus aerosol (such as confined spaces or poor air flow) and length of contact time, particularly close contact.

“With SARS-CoV-2 transmission, we are starting to get some direct information from the extensive contact tracing that is being done in some countries such as Singapore.  These studies (on thousands of contacts) show that all the above factors are important, with for example group dinners together showing clusters of cases, whereas more distant contacts do not.

“In the case of our UK minister, this sounds like a good opportunity to put the UK large scale contact tracing to the test and maybe we can identify new risk factors.  The UK is considerably colder than Singapore at the moment and this may have an important role in disease transmission.

“Our current policy of contain and delay is designed to reduce these transmission factors, with the aim of reducing the average number of contact transmissions per infected person to below 1.  This would lead to a reduction in the total number of cases, as has happened in China.  But as can be seen by the case of our minister, that may not be an easy process.

“Understanding transmission of the virus is important because the next stage, the progression of the COVID-19 disease is also highly variable.  People who may transmit a lot of virus to lots of other people, may not go on to get severe disease themselves (more than 80% with disease have only mild symptoms), but the people they transmit to, might.  Mild disease in one person does not mean mild disease in their contacts.”

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

http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

The SMC also produced a Factsheet on COVID-19 which is available here:

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/smc-novel-coronavirus-factsheet/

Declared interests

None received.