The UK ‘may have to do further lockdowns this winter’, a top expert has warned.
Dr Susan Hopkins from Public Health England said she hopes the current coronavirus wave ‘will not look the same as previous waves’, as the NHS continues to plough ahead with the vaccination programme.
More lockdowns are possible in winter – but this depends on hospital admissions and there will also be alternatives, she said.
Boris Johnson has admitted there is ‘no route to a Covid-free society’, but says he hopes the planned easing of all restrictions on July 19 will be ‘irreversible’.
The PM has delayed England’s June 21 ‘Freedom Day’ in the hope that an extra four weeks will allow everyone over 40 to get double-jabbed to protect against the Delta variant, first found in India.
When questioned on the prospect of future restrictions, Dr Hopkins said ‘we need to move to a situation that we live with this’.
Speaking on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, she said: ‘I think that means we wouldn’t normally put people into lockdown for severe cases of influenza.
‘We may have to do further lockdowns this winter, I can’t predict the future.
‘It really depends on whether hospitals start to become overwhelmed at some point.
‘But I think we will have alternative ways to manage this – through vaccination, through anti-virals, through drugs, through testing – that we didn’t have last winter.
‘All of those things allow us different approaches – rather than restrictions on lives and restrictions on livelihoods – that will move us forward into the next phase of learning to live with this as an endemic, which is something that happens with respiratory viruses.’
Dr Hopkins hopes to see 70% of adults get their second vaccine by July 19.
She said the country is currently ‘seeing the impact of vaccination’ – with cases ‘slowing down’ in areas like Boton and Blackburn and Darwen.
But there are ‘other parts, particularly in some parts of the north-east, some parts of London that are still rising quite fast’.
The top epidemiologist has also confirmed there may be ‘alternatives to isolation’ for holidaymakers who have been double-vaccinated.
It comes as speculation mounts that the Government is considering dropping the 10-day self-isolation period for fully jabbed Brits who come into contact with someone infected.
‘We will need to be alert and will need to consider how we can measure the response of these vaccines to new variants that come along,’ Dr Hopkins said.
‘But we are moving steps forward, and I think that in a time in the future, I’m not sure when, I can imagine a situation where we will have alternatives to isolation for people who have two doses of the vaccine.’
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