Covid: People with cold-like symptoms should WFH and avoid Christmas parties, says expert

People with cold-like symptoms should work from home and avoid Christmas parties to stem the spread of Covid this winter, a leading health expert has said.

Professor Tim Spector, the creator of the ZOE Covid App, said authorities should be “much more open-minded about who we are testing” and “get more people to isolate at least for a few days with cold-like symptoms”.

Under current regulations, fully vaccinated people who report symptoms of the common cold are not instructed to quarantine if they receive a negative PCR test.

But Prof Spector said that data suggested that, as the Omicron variant spreads, a return to stricter isolation rules would help to stem transmission.

“At the moment, we’re estimating that somewhere between one and three and one in four colds are actually due to Covid,” he told Times Radio.

“And so that’s quite a high rate of people that are currently not even bothered to get a lateral flow test, or getting a PCR test, going to parties and spreading it around.

“So if that transfers to Omicron then we’re going to be compiling that problem much faster than we would need to.”

Prof Spector said that anyone with cold-like symptoms should isolate for the first few days while they are “most contagious”.

He added: “We should really be encouraging people not to come in to the office, not to go to that Christmas party if they’re feeling unwell.

“We want to tell people that if you don’t feel well that day, don’t go out, don’t go to work, work from home, because the start of that sniffle, the start of that sore throat, that headache could be a mild dose of Covid that is just breaking through your vaccine.

“So I think everyone needs to be much more aware of a whole range of symptoms and not wait for the loss of smell or taste which may never come, not wait for fever, not wait for that persistent cough.”

Meanwhile, a scientific adviser warned on Sunday it is “too late” to halt the spread of the Omicron variant in the UK despite the return of travel restrictions.

Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (Spi-M), said the measures would not make a “material difference” as the strain is already “spreading pretty rapidly”.

Visiting police in Merseyside, the Prime Minister said: “We were the first country in the world to take decisive measures to tackle Omicron. We put about 10 countries automatically, immediately, on to the red list and we said that anybody coming from any country in the world would have to quarantine for a couple of days.

“We’re now toughening those measures up as we see the spread of Omicron around the world.”

Overall guidance on restrictions did not need to change as the Government awaited death and hospitalisation data on Omicron, he said.

Professor Paul Hunter, from the school of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said there was concern that Omicron “is spreading rather more quickly than the Delta variant” and there were probably more than 1,000 cases in the UK.

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