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Thursday 1 April 2021 6:35 pm

No more lockdowns: UK will treat Covid like

seasonal u, says Chris Whitty
Poppy Wood

England's chief medical o icer Chris Whitty said the UK will have to start treating Covid like seasonal
flu (Getty Images)

Lockdowns will likely become a thing of the past once England emerges from restrictions
in June, Professor Chris Whitty has said, as he suggested Britain will treat coronavirus like
the flu in the future.

England’s chief medical o icer said the UK would have to learn to live with the virus, noting that
up to 25,000 people can die in a bad flu year without the figure hitting the headlines.

Read more: EU seeks 10m Astrazeneca vaccines from India to plug jab shortfall

“It is clear we are going to have to manage it, at some point, rather like we manage the flu. Here
is a seasonal, very dangerous disease that kills thousands of people and society has chosen a
particular way round it,” he said.
Speaking at a Royal Society of Medicine webinar, said the government would only be forced to
“pull the alarm cord” if a dangerous new strain suddenly started to spread, but that it was “not
realistic” to think Covid variants could be kept out of the country.
Whitty said the government’s ambition was to shrink Covid deaths to the lowest level possible,
but warned that society would not tolerate sweeping restrictions to prevent similar numbers of
deaths to those from seasonal flu.

“We need to work out some balance which actually keeps it at a low level, minimises deaths as
best we can, but in a way that the population tolerates, through medical countermeasures like
vaccines and in due course drugs, which mean you can minimise mortality while not
maximising the economic and social impacts on our fellow citizens.”
Read more: Covid: All customers must sign in at pubs under new rules

Boris Johnson has repeatedly stated that his roadmap for leaving lockdown will provide a
“cautious but irreversible” path to “reclaiming our freedoms”.
The rapid rollout of the UK’s largest vaccination programme has begun to bear fruit in pushing
down infections, hospitalisations and deaths from coronavirus.

Daily Covid cases in the UK have plummeted in recent months from a record 81,570 on 29
December to 4,479 in the past 24 hours.

Deaths and hospitalisations have also fallen dramatically, with the number of patients currently
in hospital with Covid at just 10 per cent the level of the peak of the second wave.

Today was the 18th day in a row that the UK has recorded coronavirus-related deaths in the
double digits, marking a dramatic drop from 19 January when 1,362 Covid fatalities were
reported in a single day.

Read more: When will pubs, shops, cinemas and theatres reopen under Boris Johnson’s
roadmap?

Share: Tags: Coronavirus Vaccine

A ressurreição de jesus
A crença na ressurreição deu aos cristãos esperança por quase
2.000 anos.

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