Schools and businesses in some areas could be forced to close if the new coronavirus biosecurity centre identifies a new disease outbreak, according to the government’s action plan for overcoming the pandemic. The Whitehall centre is to have an “independent analytical function” to assess the rate of infection community by community and recommend urgent lockdown measures if necessary. “It will identify specific actions to address local spikes in infections” and advise ministers “to close schools or workplaces where infection rates have spiked” to tackle unexpected outbreaks, according to the 60-page document. The joint biosecurity centre will also have responsibility for measuring a five-tier coronavirus alert system for England, announced by Boris Johnson on Sunday night, and will be based in the Cabinet Office, responsible for cross-government coordination.
The government said the centre would be “established swiftly in coming days”. It will replace the alert system currently determined by the UK’s four chief medical officers from each of the four nations, and once it is “initially operational” it will “support the chief medical officer [for England] reach this judgment by providing more, better data than we have available today,” it said. But Monday brought little other fresh detail about the centre, such as who would staff or run it. Its initial announcement on Sunday had already been criticised by the Scottish government, which was not briefed in advance. On Monday Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said it would be ideal for all of the UK to use the same five-tier system, but then added she wanted flexibility to allow different parts of the UK to be on different parts of the scale. Sturgeon said her government had not yet seen enough details of the plan to be certain whether Scotland would adopt it. She was “very keen”, however, to contribute to the UK-wide biosecurity centre, which will handle and disseminate the data and evidence about the virus’s spread. “I’m not in any way turning my mind against using [the five-tier alert]; it may well be a very helpful tool to use to judge the decisions we take and the way in which we face those decisions, but we will have to look at it a bit more closely before we can come to a definitive decision on that,” she said. The sliding scale is designed to mirror the existing terror threat system. Johnson repeated that the UK currently sits at tier four, where a coronavirus epidemic “is in general circulation; transmission is high or rising exponentially”. But the prime minister told MPs that the threat would shortly drop a notch “thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of the British people by following the social distancing rules”. The announcement prompted questions as to whether the centre would be able to operate independently of political influence. Molly Scott Cato, a former Green party MEP, said there was no detail about its political accountability. “Whose expertise it relies on? Why and to what extent it diminishes the authority of Public Health England? Or what the involvement of political advisers may be?” the former MEP and economics professor tweeted.