Prof Deenan Pillay, professor of virology, University College London

The ways these measures are developed and issued will be balancing the urgency of trying to flatten the curve of the peak versus activities that are sustainable and realistic. The purpose of staying at home for seven days if you have a new continuous cough or a high temperature is to blunt the number of people contributing to ongoing transmission, and that is a very important step. It will help reduce deaths, but also reduce the number of people who are admitted to hospital and intensive care. From the situation in Italy, we can see that intensive care is one of the services that will soon become overwhelmed.

Its very sensible to try to limit the chances of infection in those at high risk of needing intensive care. We can also see around the world that cruise ships are more likely to have older people, but also that the cruise ship environment is an ideal chance for infections to circulate widely.

Banning overseas school trips is a difficult one, but remember that any trips involve groups of people going to airports, going on boats and coaches, and living together, and since this virus is ubiquitous now, anything like that is likely to increase acquisition. We know that children are less likely to get severe disease from coronavirus, but they nevertheless are likely, if they do get infection, to spread it to others. Its a sensible measure before closing the schools.

Many organisations and businesses are already implementing working from home and reducing meetings. Im surprised theres not an emphasis on that, it would be good for government policy to reflect it.

Im very pleased there isnt the sort of reaction weve seen in the US to close borders. This infection is now circulating in the UK and its important that, wherever those infections come from, theres an understanding that were responsible for dealing with all of them and avoid the xenophobia that has emerged and that would be perpetuated by an insular approach.

Dr Jennifer Rohn, cell biologist, University College London

Empowering ill people to stay home is a good thing. Some might have felt that their employers would not allow this, and the government mandate gives them license to do the sensible thing and stay home just in case.

Not closing schools seems understandable to me. Children will be the least likely to be affected, and therefore the least likely to be shedding virus, which is directly proportional to more serious symptoms. In contrast, if you close schools youre keeping a very large number of parents away from work as long as it is deemed feasible to keep workplaces open, its probably better not to harm the economy further in this way.

I was surprised and disappointed to see nothing on testing. The people with suggestive symptoms should be tested during their self-isolation, so that we can maintain more reliable data about the actual real-time reach and spread of this epidemic, and so that crucially their immediate contacts can be traced. What is government doing on increasing our supply of testing kits and the workforce to go out and test people at their homes? I was disappointed to hear no update on that.

People over 70 with pre-existing conditions could get into trouble in crowded settings far beyond cruise ships. I think the advice could have been more broadly reaching for this group of particularly vulnerable individuals. [Banning] international school trips feels very arbitrary to me. What about other forms of travel?

Not banning major events now is the biggest disappointment and surprise for me. I think buy-in would be high anyway many will already choose not to attend. The virus is clearly circulating in communities, and large gatherings in confined spaces could accelerate onward transmission.

Prof Paul Hunter, professor in medicine, Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia

I was expecting there to be something a bit more rigorous. I cant see that any of these measures are going to have a big impact on the current situation.

The guidance about self-isolating if you have any respiratory symptoms for a week is absolutely spot on. Im not sure how many people will actually follow that advice we shall see. But even if people ignore the advice themselves, you can imagine that if they turn up to work, colleagues and bosses will be on their case and there will be increased peer pressure.

Just telling elderly people to not go on cruises isnt enough to protect them. I wouldve hoped wed be seeing more targeted advice for elderly and vulnerable citizens on what sort of things they should be thinking about. I think theyve been left out on a limb.

The issue for me with not going on cruises would be not so you can protect yourself its because you could get quarantined for god knows how long. Its the same for the new advice on school trips: you dont want them going off and then travel bans come in and theyre quarantined in a hotel.

However, none of that is really going to affect transmission in the UK. I think at this point we are being perceived as lagging behind a lot of countries. And presumably other countries are basing their decisions on scientific information too.

I would like to see a bit more about why theyre not closing schools and banning large events. We do know, in general, that school holidays lead to a marked reduction of transmission in infections and at the end of school holidays, infection rates take off.

Im sure its based on good quality science. But we dont know what that science is. The science isnt being shared with us in a way that makes it easy for us to understand the logical basis for all of this.

I would hope that more of the information and science that the government is relying on to make these decisions would be made available so we could interrogate it and see if its valid. Unless that happens, theres a risk of losing the trust of the scientific community and the public.

One of the biggest reassurances from my perspective is having Chris Whitty as chief medical officer. Of all the chief medical officers weve had in the last few decades, he is the one with the best background to have coped with this.

Prof John Ashton, former regional director of public health for north-west England

This is a kind of ragbag with no particular logic to it. The fact that they are now declaring were moving into this second phase, as if its some kind of planned event, is really meaningless. We need to mobilise the whole community response to this and they are behaving in a top-down way, in a half-hearted way, so its neither one thing nor the other.

They are issuing some semi-directive things but they are not really doing what we need to do, which is to mobilise and encourage communities, neighbourhoods, families to form their own plans for the next period in which the local situation will influence what happens whether its not going out to eat, or stopping sporting events. It will be determined by the data, which they should be sharing promptly and fully with everybody so that people can decide for their town, village, neighbourhood what they need to do.

If everybody reduced the amount of mixing time that theyve got, that would help to slow things down. We should take this as an opportunity to develop home working. Universities dont need so much bricks and mortar because theres so much learning online.

What weve got is this cack-handed centralised country trying to run everything from London. In a period of three months weve gone from we dont need experts to we are the experts, we will tell you what to do and neither position is right. You do need expertise but you also need to trust the population.

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Verdicts of experts on UK government's new coronavirus measures - The Guardian