Pubs, restaurants and cafes have never been coronavirus hotspots, local public health directors claimed today.
Despite hospitality venues facing hugely damaging restrictions, there has never been a ‘terribly big risk’ of someone catching the disease in them, they said.
Greg Fell, director of public health in Sheffield, and Dr Richard Harling, his counterpart in Staffordshire, said the bulk of transmission has always been in people’s homes.
The hospitality industry has been crippled financially during the Covid crisis and heavily penalised under almost all lockdown tiers. Under the current national shutdown, venues have been forced to close for everything except takeaways.
In Tier 3 areas the rules were just as tough, and in Tier 2 alcohol could only be served with ‘substantial meals’, pubs and bars were forced to close unless operating as restaurants and last orders were at 10pm.
Mr Fell and Dr Harling made the comments at a virtual House of Commons Science and Technology Committee today, where they were quizzed about the failings of NHS Test and Trace.
They claimed Britain’s Covid crisis would be ‘in a better place’ now if the centralised system used local contact tracers sooner instead of focusing on call centres.
Mr Fell described the relationship between local health officials and the national system earlier in the year as ‘fundamentally broken’ and, although it has improved, it still ‘has a long way to go’.
Dr Harling warned he expects to be ‘dealing with cases of coronavirus throughout the 2020s and into the 2030s’ and that test and trace measures will be needed for decades as the country learns to live with the virus which may be around forever.
Greg Fell, director of public health in Sheffield, and Dr Richard Harling, his counterpart in Staffordshire, said pubs, restaurants and cafes have never been coronavirus hotspots
Despite hospitality venues facing hugely damaging restrictions, there has never been a ‘terribly big risk’ of someone catching the disease in them, they said
Asked about the risk of transmission in hospitality venues, Mr Fell told MPs on the Commons committee: ‘Most of the transmission events are households, within households, or household to household transmission.
‘Hospitality doesn’t crop up as a terribly big risk on our risk radar.
‘Certainly when we look at the common exposure dataset, hospitality certainly isn’t a huge risk.
‘There will have been transmission in hospitality, but it’s certainly nowhere near the top of my risk radar.’
Dr Harling added: ‘Back in the summer and autumn, once you put transmission between household members aside, the next most important one was transmission between different households.
Hospitality did feature but much lower down the list. At the moment, with hospitality closed, our main one now is other businesses, other workplaces.’
The pair were brought before the Science and Technology Committee to discuss the successes and failings of NHS Test and Trace.
The system has come under huge fire for struggling to meet its target of isolating 80 per cent of close contacts of infected patients for most of 2020.
Mr Fell said the UK would ‘probably be in better place’ if local officials had been ‘consulted earlier’.
When Test and Trace launched last May it relied solely on call centres to track down Covid carriers and their close contacts.
Local public health officials were eventually brought on board in autumn and physical contact tracers were deployed when performance dipped.
Dr Harling echoed Mr Fell’s comments, adding: ‘Our staff are invested in this, if they are successful in isolating contacts it affects them directly. It’s their community and their families. That’s not quite true with the remote system.’
Asked about the relationship between local health officials and the NHS Test and Trace scheme, Mr Fell said it was ‘improving’, but ‘still has a long way to go’.
‘It’s not as fundamentally broken as it was six to eight months ago,’ he added.
Dr Harling added: ‘It has improved but it’s still relatively remote.’
He said queries with Test and Trace have a ‘long chain of command’ and it often takes too long to get a reponse.