Ministers need to rebuild public trust in their handling of the coronavirus outbreak and compensate people for lost earnings when asked to self-isolate to prevent a resurgence of the epidemic, leading scientists have warned. Prof Susan Michie, a psychologist on a subgroup of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage), said public confidence in the UK’s handling of the crisis had fallen in recent weeks and that repairing the damage was “central” to ensuring people followed advice to contain the epidemic as the country emerged from lockdown. “There has been a dent in trust of the government to manage the pandemic over the last month, but especially over the last couple of weeks, and building that up is going to be central to managing a second wave,” Michie told the Lords science committee. As restrictions ease across the UK, health officials will look to the new test-and-trace system to help contain the virus. Under the system, close contacts of people who develop symptoms and test positive will be asked to stay at home for 14 days. But Prof Lucy Yardley, a member of the Sage committee of experts, told the Lords hearing that people had not generally been good at self-isolating even at the start of the epidemic. “We have data showing that when people thought or said they were adhering, they were nevertheless leaving the home while symptomatic,” she said. In many cases, people who were meant to be self-isolating with Covid-19 symptoms left home because they did not have others to buy shopping or collect prescriptions, or simply because they needed to work. In England, Department of Health tracking data suggests that only half of people who developed a cough or fever abided by the rules to self-isolate. “We already know there are going to be big difficulties with self-isolation if people are going to be asked to stay at home for 14 days and not go to work,” Michie told the hearing. “This is a big financial penalty, so unless people are financially compensated, it’s going to be a big disincentive for taking part in it at all.” Michie, who told the committee there was a lack of transparency in how scientific advice flowed through to policy, said the government was not helping by calling the system “test and trace” instead of adopting the World Health Organization’s terminology of “test, trace and isolate”. “If it doesn’t have it on the label, it’s not communicating that this is a vital part of it,” she said. “Without isolation, all the rest of it is for nothing.” Other scientists who gave evidence to the peers raised further doubts about the government’s strategy to contain the epidemic. Sir John Burn, a professor of clinical genetics at Newcastle University, praised the “Lighthouse labs”, a series of facilities set up to perform virus tests, but said they were too far away for many hospitals to perform tests quickly enough. “What we need to see happen is NHS labs being allowed or encouraged to take this testing back in-house,” he said. This would put test results directly into the hands of local doctors and ensure testing was “hardwired into the NHS”. “While lighthouse labs are wonderful, they are really too far away from most parts of the country to give us that same-day turnaround so we need to get our hospital laboratories back into the game,” he said. “We’ve already started to run into problems with frontline teams isolated for long periods, so testing will allow us to get people back into work,” he added. Because infected people can spread the virus before they develop symptoms, or without symptoms ever showing, scientists on Sage concluded in May that for test and trace to be effective, 80% of contacts would have to be isolated within 48 hours of the infected person first developing symptoms. In many cases it takes longer than that for a test result to be returned. “Testing needs to be made possible at scale in the very early stages if we’re to have an impact on the spread of the disease, and at the moment we still don’t have the scale of testing or the accessibility of testing to really meet that challenge,” Burn said.